Why is Elon Musk’s X struggling with technical problems?

Within minutes, the word “crashed” was trending on X, as users posted about the high-profile failure.

Some (of course) took the opportunity to take aim at Mr Musk. Others spun the interview as having been of such great interest that it had “crashed the internet”.

Mr Musk pointed the finger at something else entirely though: a cyber attack.

“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on X,” Musk posted.

A distributed denial of service attack – or DDoS for short – is an attempt to overload a website, which makes it hard to use or otherwise inaccessible..

The BBC cannot independently verify whether such a cyber attack occurred or not, but tech blog The Verge says its sources at X told it there was no such attack, external.

Meanwhile, experts are split.

“It very well could be a DDoS attack,” Matthew Prince, the head of security firm Cloudflare, told the BBC.

He said it was “impossible for us to know” because X does not use Cloudflare to secure its Spaces system, but he said his firm did reach out to Mr Musk to offer assistance.

Meanwhile Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, said the social media platform’s explanation of how the issue was fixed “isn’t particularly consistent” with a DDoS attack.

“Given Elon Musk’s claim that X had to limit the number of live listeners to mitigate the issue, we can infer that the outage correlated to the number of live listeners,” said Mr Toker.

“Limiting the number of legitimate users isn’t an ordinary mitigation for DDoS attacks and wouldn’t usually help… so Mr Musk’s own statement suggests that the platform might have been struggling with overall listener capacity.”

There is another, more prosaic, explanation for what happened: the deep cuts to the company’s workforce that Mr Musk instigated.

“Spaces has historically folded when large number of users have entered this area of X”, said Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at cyber security firm ESET.

“This also may have been escalated due to the fact Musk laid off large swathes of employees when he took control of the platform.”

His thoughts were echoed by Rashik Parmar, head of BCS, the chartered institute for IT, who said even if it was a cyber attack, “firing 80%” of the firm’s engineers was always going to have “a significant impact”.

“Engineers are at the forefront of defending against these cyber threats,” he said.

“Without adequate staffing, the ability of social media platforms to protect their networks and users from DDoS attacks is severely compromised.”

Whether down to a malicious third party or its own shortcomings, however, the end result is much the same.

An interview that was meant to show off the capabilities of a platform that, we are told, will one day become an “everything app” ended up showing its old technical limitations have not gone away.