The highly publicised live chat between tech billionaire Elon Musk and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was plagued by technical problems. The live stream on Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter) started about three-and-a-quarter hours late. At first, it was repeatedly unavailable.
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Artists against image generators: lawsuit in the United States clears the next hurdleMusk claimed on X that the platform was the target of a massive DDoS attack. Such attacks flood websites with a massive amount of requests, bringing them to their knees. Musk announced that, if necessary, he would talk to Trump live in front of a small number of listeners and then release a recording.
overloaded server on x
Trump and Musk first spoke about the attack in which a gunman injured the former president during a campaign event in the US state of Pennsylvania nearly a month ago.
The platform showed a figure of about one million listeners – although it was unclear how many of them could hear anything. Musk wrote on X that the livestream system had previously been tested with about 8 million listeners.
When Musk hosted a livestream for then-Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis at X last year, the broadcast was significantly delayed because servers were initially overloaded. After buying Twitter, Musk laid off several employees and reduced investments.
Trump returns to X
Trump had not spoken at X for nearly a year. He resumed with a campaign video. In it, his journey from his first electoral victory in 2016 to his current presidential candidacy is presented as a continuous struggle against the resistance of his political opponents – and as the heroic story of a man who refuses to let it disappoint him.
Several other clips and campaign posts followed – and the platform advertised Trump’s planned exchange with X owner Elon Musk. The tech billionaire openly supports the Republican in the current presidential election campaign.
Trump last used his historic police photo as an opportunity to return to X in late August 2023. Trump posted the photo there that was taken in a prison in Atlanta some time ago. The Republican turned himself in to law enforcement there after charges were brought against him in the state of Georgia in connection with an attempt at election fraud. Trump is the first former US president to be charged with multiple counts. And he is the first former US president to appear in prison and be immortalized in a police photo.
Prior to this, there was radio silence on Trump’s X account for more than two and a half years. Trump has always had a good number of followers there, currently more than 88 million.
Trump blocked on social networks
At the end of his term in office, the Republican was blocked from major online platforms after his supporters attacked the US Capitol headquarters in Washington on January 6, 2021. In his online messages before and after the Capitol attack, he openly expressed sympathy for the rioters. So platform operators feared that new violence could occur if Trump was not banned – and blocked his accounts.
Trump now has access to all major online services. However, so far, he has hardly used X. Instead, Trump helped set up the Truth Social platform, a copy of Twitter. Trump uses it intensively. However, he has little reach there, with about 7.5 million subscribers.
(EMW)
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