An alleged DDoS attack on X disrupted US’ Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s interview with the billionaire entrepreneur and the owner of Tesla and X, Elon Musk on Tuesday. The attack was massive. It was unclear at the moment about when would the platform resume its functions to normal.
Musk, the owner later confirmed that the servers of X were later tested for the platform’s interview functionality (Twitter Space). It could allow with 8 million listeners post the alleged attack. He later announced a livestream at 8:30 pm ET at a reduced scale with fewer listeners. An unedited video of the interview was posted afterwards.
‘Worst Case’ Scenario: DDoS Attack on X
Donald Trump’s conversation with tech-entrepreneur Elon Musk, scheduled on Tuesday was expected to add twists of controversial revelations to the already unpredictable US Presidential elections. But just before the interview had to begin, Musk came with an update acknowledging a “worst case” of cyberattack (a DDoS attack) on X, marring the planned discussion.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
While Elon Musk also updated in the same X post that they were trying to stop the DDoS attack on X, it had already done substantial damage. Calling it the “worst case”, he updated that only a handful of listeners would be able to live stream the discussion while the others would have to wait until they posted an uncut recording of the interview later.
At that moment, it was not clear about how many people would be able to join the interview as listeners. After their attempts to stop the DDoS attack, the interview was finally carried out at 8:30 pm ET.
We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter https://t.co/oxF8PsNHnZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
What is a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS attack is an intentional attempt to disrupt the regular operations of a system or platform. This is done by flooding the servers with uncontrolled traffic led by bots. This leads to a Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attack.
DDoS assaults also involve multiple hacked systems as a source for the DDoS attack traffic. IoT devices and networked resources like organizational computers are the most attacked targets of the DDoS assaults. Such attacks overwhelm the systems or platform with uncontrolled traffic, barring the relevant traffic from reaching the platform.
Although the duo did not directly discuss cryptocurrency during their interview which was impacted due to the alleged DDoS attack on X, there was a wild swing in the crypto market before and after the interview. Bitcoin has made an improvement in its position after almost a week long sluggish performance. This progress happened after hundreds of panic stricken crypto investors had already sold their Bitcoins.
