Former engineers at X and outside experts cast further doubt Tuesday on Elon Musk’s claim that a 40-minute delay in his Monday audio conversation with Donald Trump was caused by a “massive” cyberattack.
Musk said Monday that the technical glitches that stopped the heavily promoted episode on Spaces, X’s live audio platform, from starting on time were because of a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, in which many devices send meaningless data at once to overwhelm an offering.
A senior engineer at X told an outside expert late Tuesday that there had been no evidence of an attack, the expert relayed to The Washington Post.
Other technologists also expressed skepticism, partially because a previous high-profile Spaces event — in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination — also crashed when large numbers of listeners tried to join. Other parts of X kept functioning Monday, so any attack would have had to be extremely targeted.
“DDoS is certainly a plausible reason, but I think it’s unlikely, and I’d demand to see actual numbers to believe it was DDoS,” said former NSA hacker Robert Graham, a consultant and security commentator.
Musk cut three-fourths of the social media company’s staff since buying it in 2022 and closed a major data center and other infrastructure that support the large user base.
“The assumption of the ex-Tweeps is that this is a predictable outcome of having gotten rid of a ton of the infra and infra people,” one former X engineer said. “We’re all just rolling our eyes.”
Companies that monitor the internet for unusual bursts of traffic did not report anything out of the ordinary.
Musk posted that he had tested the system’s ability to handle 8 million simultaneous connections, but that test might not have reflected realistic conditions.
Musk and his followers on X let fly Monday with wild accusations and theories without offering any evidence beyond the crash and his words. The “deep state” FBI and CIA were suppressing the conversation, one said, or it was the Democrats desperate to silence Trump. Some assertions gaining the most views came from far-right influencers and attention seekers who have thrived on Musk’s platform by posting falsehoods and speculation in the past.
Others were from fellow technology investors such as Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who posted: “Its Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!” Musk responded: “Yeah.” Pincus on Tuesday said he had been joking.
An attack would be the only way for Musk to allocate responsibility for the long delay away from his own platform. Other companies can live-stream simultaneously to 1 million people, as the Spaces event eventually did. But accommodating that number of listeners clearly caused problems for X.
Most kinds of DDoS should have been easy for X to master, former staffers and experts said.
“By the time there’s something [so large] they actually shouldn’t be able to handle, it should be melting bits of the internet. And no one was seeing that happen,” the former X engineer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
If there were an extremely sophisticated attack that did not need massive bandwidth, then an X without cutbacks should have been able to thwart it, Graham said.
Musk posted no new information about what happened Tuesday, and the company did not respond to a request for data on the techniques and volumes of the attack.
“I don’t think he based the claim on actual facts, but simply on his belief that he’d properly tested it earlier in the day,” Graham told The Post.