The much talked about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s joint X Spaces event faced technical difficulties and appeared to have crashed on Monday.
The event, a conversation between the owner of X and the former U.S. President, was scheduled to begin at 5 pm PT (12:00am GMT). However, users attempting to join were met with an error message stating, “This Space is not available.” The much-anticipated discussion, heavily promoted by both Trump and Musk, was intended to mark Trump’s return to X. The event eventually started at 5:42 pm PT, 42 minutes after the scheduled time.
Earlier in the day, Trump made his first post on X since being banned in January 2021, with several posts promoting the conversation and featuring campaign ads and links to his website. Despite being reinstated on the platform in November 2022 after Musk took over, Trump had primarily been using his own social media platform, Truth Social, for the past three years.
Musk suggested that the crash was caused by a “massive DDOS attack on X,” referring to a distributed denial-of-service attack where servers are overwhelmed with artificial traffic. He linked the alleged attack to opposition against allowing Trump to speak, stating, “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honored to have this conversation.”
This incident is not the first time an X Spaces event has encountered issues during a political campaign. In May 2023, technical problems on the platform disrupted Ron DeSantis’s 2024 campaign announcement during a Twitter Space session with Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks.
European Commissioner Thierry Breton ahead of the Trump conversation warned X owner that the company may face penalties if it doesn’t address the spread of illegal content.
