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By Joe Edwards
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On Monday Elon Musk conducted a much-anticipated interview with former President Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter), a platform the billionaire CEO of Tesla bought in 2022.
But the conversation began later than expected, a delay which Musk suggested was due to a "massive DDOS" attack.
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"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down," he said in a post on the social media platform.
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"Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of listeners and post the conversation later," he added.
Musk later said that the system had been tested "with 8 million concurrent listeners" prior to his scheduled conversation with the former president and that the chat would proceed with a smaller number of listeners.
What Is a DDoS Attack?
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a common and disruptive type of cyberattack aimed at overwhelming a target's online service with excessive traffic.
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In a DDoS attack, the perpetrator uses multiple compromised systems to send a flood of data requests to the target's server, overwhelming its ability to process legitimate requests. This often results in the server crashing or becoming inaccessible to regular users.
DDoS attacks can be orchestrated using botnets - networks of infected devices controlled remotely by attackers.
Several prominent DDoS attacks have made headlines over the years due to their scale and impact.
In 2016, one of the most notorious DDoS attacks targeted Dyn, a company that managed a significant portion of the internet's domain name system (DNS) infrastructure. The attack temporarily brought down major websites, including Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit.
This attack exploited a botnet primarily comprised of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as cameras and DVRs, which overwhelmed Dyn's servers, and was orchestrated by Mirai malware.
Two years later, GitHub, a developer platform that allows users to create and share code, was hit with a 1.3-Tbps (terabit per second) DDoS attack, described at the time as the largest ever.
In 2020 a series of DDoS attacks targeted the New Zealand Stock Exchange, causing trading disruptions over multiple days.
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Did a DDoS Attack Hit the Musk-Trump Interview?
Emiliano De Cristofaro, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside, told Newsweek that he highly doubted a DDoS was responsible.
"There is no evidence of any malicious activity happening but more importantly no other functionality was affected," he said.
"It is much more likely that the platform just couldn't handle a sudden big spike in the number of users trying to stream," the professor added.
NetBlocks, a nonprofit that monitors cybersecurity, said in an online post that the incident was understood to be due to a server issue, though later reshared a post which stated that "any sufficiently overloaded server is indistinguishable [from a DDOS attack]."
Newsweek has reached out to X for comment via email outside of standard working hours.
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