It was supposed to be the ‘interview of the century’, however, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk was marred by technical glitches. People were unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform.
Musk said that X was going through a massive DDoS attack that could lead to limited live listeners during the Trump interview. He later added that the interview will go with a smaller number of concurrent listeners and promised to “post the unedited audio immediately thereafter”.
What is DDoS?
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a common technique used to temporarily bring down websites. It is not the same as hacking into a website. These are well-orchestrated attacks on the web servers of a website and the domain name servers.
The idea is to flood the servers with a huge number of requests which in turn can lead to a temporary outage of the website or a shutdown of the servers. Once this is accomplished, users can be redirected to an intermediate page, where often the perpetrators of these attacks post their messages explaining the reason why the website has been targeted.
DDoS attacks can cause temporary outages to legitimate users because the attack has occupied a major chunk of network bandwidth and server resources. In many cases, it may cause the websites to go offline as the Web servers can shut down.
Script and production: V Nivedita
