X Spaces With Trump and Musk Is Off to a Glitchy Start
X Spaces With Trump and Musk Is Off to a Glitchy Start - The New York Times
X Spaces with Trump is off to a glitchy start.
The audio livestream of a conversation between Elon Musk and the former president ran late as users scrambled to try to access the site.
Elon Musk’s live conversation with former president Donald J. Trump on X got off to a glitchy start on Monday, a setback for the social media service as Mr. Musk pushes the company to regain its dominance as an online epicenter of political discourse.
Some users who tried to listen to the conversation, which was hosted on the company’s audio livestreaming feature called Spaces, were greeted by silence and an error message that read: “Details not available.” Users said they had trouble accessing the livestream on desktop computers and mobile phones. Those who were able to get the livestream to work were met with hold music.
The Spaces event was originally scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern. The number of attendees fluctuated wildly as users struggled to gain access, drifting between 100,000 and more than 700,000 listeners.
Mr. Musk blamed a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, for the glitches. DDoS attacks work by flooding servers with malicious traffic and knocking them offline.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he wrote. The attack could not immediately be verified.
Mr. Musk claimed the system had been tested “with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier that day.
He had spent Sunday evening testing the service to make sure it could stay up and running by streaming himself playing a video game.
X also implemented what is known as a code freeze, which blocks employees from making any major changes to the platform’s underlying code. Such freezes are standard practice ahead of major events because they prevent last-minute tweaks that could take down the service, according to an X employee who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Live events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics are often X’s busiest moments, when people flock to the platform to discuss the key moments in the games and advertisers run multimillion dollar campaigns on the site. The heavy traffic is typically a test of X’s computing power.
Since buying X in 2022, Mr. Musk has fired or laid off more than 75 percent of its employees, leaving about 1,500 workers, down from 7,500 at the time of the acquisition. Mr. Musk has also aggressively cut other costs at X and alienated top advertisers with bombastic commentary about the industry.
While X has largely run smoothly since Mr. Musk’s takeover, the changes have led to some breakdowns in the service. In December 2022, as the company began to transition services away from one of its main data centers in Sacramento, the site was interrupted for several hours. In January 2023, Twitter users in Australia and New Zealand reported that they were unable to use the site for more than half a day.
In May 2023, Mr. Musk hosted a live audio conversation on X with Florida governor and then-Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis that was marred by glitches and eventually crashed. The incident, which Mr. Musk blamed on the influx of listeners, did not lead to a sitewide failure.
There are two main reasons for system failures or bugs, according to engineers who worked at X, which was previously known as Twitter. Someone might update code in a way that causes an error, or usage could spike and overload the company’s computer servers.
Large social media platforms and other websites have gone offline before. In 2021, Facebook and its family of apps, which include Instagram and WhatsApp, were knocked offline for more than five hours after changes were made to its internet infrastructure, interrupting communications.
Kellen Browning contributed reporting.
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at kate.conger@nytimes.com. More about Kate Conger
Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. More about Ryan Mac
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