Trump complains about news coverage of conversation with Musk

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday complained about news coverage of the conversation he and Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk had on the platform Monday night.

The virtual event kicked off after a more than 40-minute delay because of technical difficulties. “I spent 2 1/2 hours last night talking to Elon, a fantastic guy, getting all-time record Views/hits, and all the Fake News wants to report is that the servers crashed (because of the tremendous volume!), and the show opened a little late. What they should be reporting was the incredible number of people that were listening. I absolutely HATE the Fake News Media. So bad for our Country!” Trump posted on Truth Social. 

Trump is saying the servers crashed “because of the tremendous volume” but Musk claimed a distributed denial-of-service attack had overwhelmed the company’s servers. It is unclear what the technical issue was.

“DDOS,” or distributed denial of service, is a common attack method in which hackers flood a site with phony traffic to overwhelm its systems and attempt to knock it offline.

Early Tuesday, however, Musk also blamed mistakes by X’s staff for the snafu that prevented people from joining the stream in a post on the platform. Musk didn’t specify what kind of mistakes he believed X staffers made or how a DDOS attack would have targeted a specific stream but not brought down the rest of the X platform, which remained operational during the Trump stream meltdown.