This article is hearsay trash. It quotes an anonymous source saying "there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was lying about an attack.

It quotes two sources, both who work at X.

The Verge has no political bias, has a good reputation and thus deserve the benefit of the doubt.

I think you'd struggle to find a human on this planet that isn't biased one way or another when it comes to Musk

"The Verge has no political bias". Okay, in the same way that wired has no political bias. They're so unbiased yet you know exactly the way an article is slanted towards given the topic and persons. Just like I know the slant given a reddit /r/all post or Fox News/msnbc article.

They titled the article: The Elon Musk / Donald Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster

If they were actually neutral, they'd phrase it more like: with technical difficulties.

I would consider the widely-publicised event not starting for 40 minutes due to technical issues to be a "tech disaster."

Trump called it a disaster when the same thing happened DeSantis, so I don't see a particular bias in play with that particular phrase.

Trump is both partisan and biased and doesn't claim to be neutral. Of course he was trashing things to do with his political opponents (he was running against DeSantis in the primary at the time).

Thanks for the clarification. I should have never commented on anything even remotely political, my bad!

Verge editors most definitely are biased as are all humans. Journalists are not neutral. In this case someone made a "99 percent chance" speculative statement and the publication decided to print it as if it were fact and not just dismiss it as coming from someone who knew nothing.

We know nothing about the sources, and writers are not above making stuff up. I could just as easily spin it on them: there's a 99 percent chance they made up the sources.

Let’s review the evidence then shall we:

Evidence for DDOS:

- Elon said so

- the event in question very clearly had huge technical issues

Evidence Against DDOS:

- Elon said so

- People who worked at Twitter said it was bullshit

- every other spaces event that was run at the same time was unaffected.

- no other part of the website was impacted in any way whatsoever.

- every other spaces event that was run at the same time was unaffected. - no other part of the website was impacted in any way whatsoever.

Aren’t these last two an argument FOR a ddos attack? It seems reasonable to assume we’re there a ddos attack at that time it would be against the Elon/Trump stream explicitly.

I’d like to see an explanation of how that is even possible to get that level of targeting without knowing the connection details of either Elon or Trump. The rest of the attack surface is surely shared infrastructure with the rest of the website.

So no I think it was just a straight up technical failure on their end.

How did it clear up?

> People who worked at Twitter said it was bullshit

No, we have no idea from The Verge article whether the sources are even qualified to make such statements or if the statements are even true. In fact on the basis of the 99 percent speculative quote we can disregard the source quotes altogether. I'll say this, I work on far less significant software than X and we get DDOSed all the time.

> every other spaces event that was run at the same time was unaffected.

That's not true, I wasn't even able to load my feed during the initial part of the stream.

You seem to be invested in this topic in a weird and unhealthy way but there is nothing of value here in this comment.

You baselessly accuse journalists of straight up making things up and then go on to give some anecdotal evidence that conveniently nobody can disprove.

The Register weighed in with a Yeah, Right skeptical attitude:

    The Register has found no evidence of a denial of service attack directed at X. Check Point Software's live cyber threat map does not record unusual levels of activity at the time of writing. NetScout's real-time DDoS map recorded only small attacks on the US.

    If a DDoS was indeed the reason for the delayed start of the event, it appears not to have impacted the rest of X's operations – there were plenty of posts commenting on the problems with the Space occupied by the interview. And Musk was tweeting from the very network said to be under attack.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/13/trump_musk_livestream...

They also threw shade on the numbers:

    The interview commenced some 40 minutes after its advertised time. Live audience statistics reported 1.1 to 1.3 million attendees during the portions of the event The Register observed – although during the stream Trump claimed that the event had an audience of 60 million or more, exceeding targets of 25 million.

This is the reason why we teach kids stories like little red riding hood because it’s just such a fundamental thing that when you lie about absolutely everything all the time people will just never trust you again even if you happen to be telling the truth one particular time.

And unfortunately both of these men are known for bullshitting more than anything else and have been now for a long time.

Fully Working Spaces coming next year, he swears.

by the time Trump made that statement, there were 60 million views, which is a different metric than the active viewers.

Sure.

Was Trump a fool to count the people that took one look and changed channels, or a knowledgable and deliberate deceiver?

I mean, 99% percent chance of lying is the Bayesian prior with this person anyways.