Elon Musk and Donald Trump's joint X Spaces event appears to have been aborted on Monday afternoon. The conversation between the X owner and the former president was scheduled for 5 p.m. PT, but users who tried to join at that time received an error message.
When trying to join a space on X, I get the message “This space is not available.”
The highly anticipated conversation, promoted by Trump and Musk, marked the former US president’s return to X. The Spaces event, which Musk called “the conversation,” began at 5:42 p.m. Pacific Time. The live event was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. Pacific Time.
Trump returned to social media on Monday morning, posting for the first time since being banned from the platform in January 2021. Some of Trump’s Monday posts promoted his conversation with Musk, while others featured campaign ads and links to the former president’s website. Over the past three years, Trump has shifted to posting primarily on his own social media platform, Truth Social. Despite this, Trump was able to post on X for nearly two years. Shortly after Musk acquired Twitter, now X, he restored Trump’s Twitter account in November 2022.
Musk claimed that there appeared to be a “massive DDOS attack on X,” which is likely what caused X Space to crash. The X owner said the social media platform conducted a massive test earlier today with 8 million concurrent viewers. Musk began the Space interview by linking DDOS attacks (short for distributed denial of service attacks, where malicious actors overwhelm internet servers with artificial traffic) to the former president’s opposition to the hearings.
“As we’ve seen from this massive attack, there are a lot of people who are against listening to President Trump, but it’s an honor to be having this conversation,” Musk said as SpaceX launched.
This isn’t the first time X Space has crashed when a political campaign tries to use the platform. In May 2023, technical issues with Twitter caused Ron DeSantis’ 2024 campaign announcement to be interrupted during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks.
