Elon Musk's excuse that cyberattackers left his chat with Donald Trump glitch-filled doesn't add up for some technology experts and former employees of X.
The Monday event that was hosted on the Musk-owned platform was delayed by 40 minutes by technical problems.
The billionaire put the blame on a Distributed Denial of Service attack, a term used for a targeted effort by outsiders to disrupt service. But, in interviews with the Washington Post, that was greeted with skepticism by former X insiders based on the fact that he cleaned house after he took over the social media platform.
Before the interview, the content of which raised questions in its own right, Musk stated his X Spaces platform which hosted it had been stress-tested for stability — and yet fans and critics, of Donald Trump were left standing on the outside unable to listen.
Former NSA hacker Robert Graham an internet security expert, stated, "DDoS is certainly a plausible reason, but I think it’s unlikely, and I’d demand to see actual numbers to believe it was DDoS."
One former X engineer also had doubts, telling the Post, "The assumption of the ex-Tweeps (former Twitter employees) is that this is a predictable outcome of having gotten rid of a ton of the infra and infra people. We’re all just rolling our eyes.”
Musk fired 80 percent of his staff after taking over the platform, then called Twitter, in 2022.
"Musk and his followers on X let fly Monday with wild accusations and theories without offering any evidence beyond the crash and his words," the Post's Joseph Menn wrote.
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"The 'deep state' FBI and CIA were suppressing the conversation, one said, or it was the Democrats desperate to silence Trump. Some assertions gaining the most views came from far-right influencers and attention seekers who have thrived on Musk’s platform by posting falsehoods and speculation in the past."
Another former X employee also pointed out the lack of evidence that it was external factors that led to the technological failure.
“By the time there’s something [so large] they actually shouldn’t be able to handle, it should be melting bits of the internet. And no one was seeing that happen,” they claimed, with Graham adding, "I don’t think he based the claim on actual facts, but simply on his belief that he’d properly tested it earlier in the day.”
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