Elon Musk and Donald Trump's joint X Spaces event appeared to crash on Monday afternoon. The conversation between the X owner and the former president was scheduled for 5pm PST, but users who attended at that time received an error message.
When I tried to join the space, X showed me the message “This space is not available.”
The highly anticipated conversation, which had been pushed by President Trump and Musk, was meant to mark the former US president's return to X. The Spaces event, which Musk called “the conversation,” began at 5:42 PM PST. The live event was scheduled to begin at 5 PM PST.
Image credit: X Screenshots
Trump returned to social media on Monday morning, posting for the first time since he was banned from the platform in January 2021. Some of Trump's posts on Monday promoted his conversation with Musk, while others featured campaign ads and links to the former president's website. For the past three years, Trump has primarily posted on his own social media platform, TruthSocial. However, Trump has been allowed to post on X for almost two years, and he reinstated Trump's Twitter account in November 2022, shortly after Musk took over Twitter (now X).
Musk claimed there appears to have been a “massive DDOS attack on X,” which is likely what caused the X Space crash. According to X's owners, the social media platform ran a massive test with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today. Musk began his Space interview by linking the alleged DDOS attack (short for distributed denial of service, where bad actors overwhelm internet servers with a large amount of synthetic traffic) to the former president's opposition to the hearings.
“As this massive attack shows, there's a lot of opposition to just listening to President Trump, but I'm honored to be having these conversations,” Musk said at the launch of the space.
This isn't the first time X Space has crashed when a political campaign tried to use the platform: In May 2023, technical issues with Twitter interrupted Ron DeSantis' 2024 campaign announcement during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sachs.