Elon Musk and Donald Trump's X Spaces event crashes

Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s joint X Spaces event appears to have crashed Monday afternoon. The conversation between the owner of X and the former president was scheduled for 5 p.m. PT, but users received an error message when joining at that time.

“This Space is not available,” said a message on X when trying to join the Space.

The highly anticipated conversation — which has been promoted by Trump and Musk — was supposed to mark the former U.S. president’s return to X. The Spaces event, which Musk called a “conversation,” started at 5:42 p.m. PT. The live event was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PT.

Trump returned to the social media outlet Monday morning, where he posted for the first time since January 2021 when he was banned from the platform. Some of Trump’s Monday posts promoted the conversation with Musk, while others featured campaign ads and links to the former president’s website. For the last three years, Trump has switched to primarily posting on his own social media platform Truth Social. That said, Trump has been allowed to post on X for nearly two years; shortly after Musk took over Twitter, now X, he reinstated Trump’s Twitter account in November 2022.

Musk claimed that “a massive DDoS attack on X” appeared to have occurred, supposedly the cause of the crashed X Space. The owner of X says the social media platform conducted extensive testing earlier today with 8 million concurrent listeners. Musk kicked off the Space interview by connecting the alleged DDoS attack — which stands for “distributed denial-of-service,” in which a bad actor overwhelms an internet server with a flood of artificial traffic — with opposition to hearing the former president.

“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say and so, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” Musk said as the Spaces began.

This is not the first instance of an X Space crashing when a political campaign tries to use the platform. In May 2023, Twitter’s technical issues interrupted Ron DeSantis’s 2024 campaign announcement during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks.