What is a DDOS attack? Malicious cyber attack that delayed Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump on X

X owner Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump were slated for a live interview on X at 8am ET (5:30 am India time). However, at the last moment Musk said that the social media platform was going through a massive DDOS attack that could lead to limited live listeners during the Trump interview.

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In a post detailing about the DDOS attack, Musk wrote, “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

"We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter" Musk added.

In a subsequent post, Musk also explained that the social media platform was tested with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier in the day in order to ensure smooth operations during the Trump interview.

What is a DDOS attack?

Distributed denial of service attacks are malicious attempts to make the services of an online service unavailable by disrupting or suspending the services of its online servers.

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Cybersecurity company Norton stated that DDoS “is a type of hacking attack that aims to disrupt the normal operations of a targeted server, service, or network by flooding it with internet traffic. Overwhelmed with traffic, the server or network can no longer handle normal requests, which causes it to significantly slow down or crash altogether.”

Meanwhile, a Microsoft support page states that DDoS attacks the ‘target websites and servers by disrupting network services in an attempt to exhaust an application’s resources’. It states that although DDoS attacks are wide reaching and target all sorts of industries some industries like gaming, e-commerce and telecommunication are targeted more than the others.