Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s X Spaces Event Fails

Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s joint X Spaces event apparently ended Monday afternoon. The call between the X owner and the previous president was scheduled for five p.m. Pacific Time, but users received an error message once they joined at the moment.

“This space is unavailable” – a message was displayed on X when trying to hitch an area.

The highly anticipated conversation — promoted by Trump and Musk — was set to mark the previous US president’s return to X. The Spaces event, which Musk called “the conversation,” began at 5:42 p.m. PT. The live event was scheduled to start at 5:00 p.m. PT.

Trump returned to social media Monday morning, posting for the primary time since January 2021, when he was banned from the platform. Some of Trump’s posts on Monday promoted a conversation with Musk, while others included campaign ads and links to the previous president’s website. For the past three years, Trump has switched to posting totally on his own social media platform, Truth Social. That said, Trump was allowed to post on X for nearly two years; shortly after Musk took over Twitter, now X, he restored Trump’s Twitter account in November 2022.

Musk he claimed A “massive DDOS attack on X” apparently occurred, allegedly causing X Space to crash. X’s owner says the social media platform conducted extensive testing today with 8 million concurrent listeners. Musk began his interview with Space by linking the alleged DDOS attack — which stands for distributed denial-of-service, wherein a nasty actor overwhelms an internet server with a flood of artificial traffic — to his objection to hearing from the previous president.

“As this massive attack shows, there’s a lot of resistance to people just listening to what President Trump has to say, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” Musk said in the beginning of Spaces.

This isn’t the primary time X Space has crashed while a political campaign has tried to make use of the platform. In May 2023, Twitter technical difficulties interrupted Ron DeSantis’ 2024 campaign announcement during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and enterprise capitalist David Sacks.