San Francisco, CA — Elon Musk’s high-profile interview with former President Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter) was marred by significant technical issues, highlighting ongoing challenges with the platform’s infrastructure.

Scheduled for a live discussion, the interview faced a 40-minute delay as X struggled with severe tech problems. This latest glitch follows a series of high-profile malfunctions on the platform, including a problematic launch event for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign in May 2023.

Despite Musk’s recent claims of performing “system scaling tests” on X’s audio chat feature, known as “Spaces,” the platform experienced another major failure. As the interview was set to begin, users encountered a blank screen with the message “unable to fetch Space.” Within minutes, “crashed” became a trending topic on the platform as users expressed frustration and some humorously suggested that the interest in the interview had “crashed the internet.”

Musk quickly attributed the problem to a cyber attack, specifically a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which aims to overwhelm a website and render it inaccessible. However, this claim remains unverified. Tech blog The Verge reported that X’s sources indicated no such attack occurred.

Security expert Matthew Prince from Cloudflare noted that while a DDoS attack was possible, it was challenging to confirm without Cloudflare’s involvement in X’s security. On the other hand, Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, argued that the platform’s response and the reported issues were inconsistent with a typical DDoS attack. He suggested that the problems were more likely related to the platform’s capacity to handle large numbers of live listeners.

Another plausible explanation points to the significant staff reductions at X under Musk’s leadership. Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at ESET, indicated that the platform’s recurring issues with high user volumes could be exacerbated by the substantial layoffs that have affected its engineering team. Rashik Parmar, head of BCS, the chartered institute for IT, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that the reduction in engineering staff could severely impair the platform’s ability to defend against cyber threats and manage technical problems effectively.

Regardless of the cause, the technical difficulties during the interview underscore ongoing challenges for X, as it seeks to position itself as an “everything app” capable of handling complex and high-profile events. The incident serves as a reminder of the platform’s persistent technical limitations and the broader implications of significant staff reductions on its operational resilience.