The Elon Musk / Donald Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster
www.theverge.com
Musk claims there was a DDOS attack on X — but The Verge is told there was not.

Musk claims there was a DDOS attack on X — but The Verge is told there was not.

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1742·
    3 months ago

    So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1131·
      3 months ago

      Its probably fairly straightforward:

      Their new format and infrastructure for video hosting was not properly tested, and they did not expect the amount of bandwidth needed to support viewership demand.

      Basically, same thing as a modern AAA live service game launch.

      It probably isn’t a DDOS. Its probably just… a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

          • blackbelt352@lemmy.worldEnglish
            26·
            3 months ago

            I mean, the devs and server techs know what’s going on, its the execs and middle managers that need to get a live service on a shoestring budged to make the shareholders happy that you made them 25% more profit than last quarter.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Well that’s the thing: they would need to hire actual server devs and techs in order to have somebody who knows what’s going on.

              Having done both sides, I can tell you that front-end development in gamedev does not in any way form or shape prepare somebody for designing good backends at any level (code or systems architecture), designing multi-tiered systems or even to just design good comms protocols - they’re pretty much opposite sides of development, and not just in a physical or systems structure sense.

              • blackbelt352@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 months ago

                I mean, you’re not wrong but I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at. Yeah front end and backend development are very different skillets, but my point is the people working and coding and making the game generally do actually know what they’re doing, but its middle managers are given orders from on high by execs, most of whom probably haven’t touched a video game ever in their lives, keeping the board of directors happy with quarterly profit increases.

                I wasn’t talking about the horizontal divide between front end and back end devs, but the vertical divide between management/executives and the devs and techs.

                • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  I agree with you.

                  My point is that it’s not uncommon for the higher ups (and even middle management) to think that making games is making the fancy stuff you see on the screen and not understand that as soon as it involves networking it’s a whole different ball game with a different skill set and considerations: due to thinking that “games developers” should be able to do the whole “game thing” (which in a game with networking is not just frontend but also backend) they won’t hire the people who “work and code” backend stuff and hence know how to do the backend.

                  In fact in my experience even the people who “work and code” frontend stuff tend to, until they actually try doing it, underestimate the difficulty of backend development and differences between that and what they do, hence overestimate their capability to do it.

                  The point being that they might not have the people who “work and code” in that specific domain because they didn’t saw the need for different specialists than the ones they already had hence never hired them in the first place.

          • InternetUser2012@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            You really think an AAA game isn’t more capable than a platform owned and run by Musk? They guy who fired everyone that would make sure shit like that worked. Come on man, the sweet child comment is cute but you’re comparing New York City to some bumfuck town in Indiana.

            • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              Having been a player of “triple A” games for a loooong time, they are shoddy at best and appallingly broken at worst (see especially: on launch, immediately after a successor is released). I haven’t seen a decent game launch that wasn’t indie in over a decade, and I’ll only be quiet about it when even one game from a big name publisher doesn’t suck hairy donkey balls.

              It’s all about the profits, baby. Squeeze those pennies until they bleed. Buggy games, horribly inadequate servers, mass-banning players automatically and inaccurately, cheaters galore; doesn’t matter as long as profits go up. The CEO of EA or Ubi or whatever is no better, don’t get it twisted.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
          111·
          3 months ago

          I am remembering a lot of AAA games in the past two years that have launched and basically been unplayable for a day to two weeks due to some kind of combination of not enough servers, garbage netcode, or other game breaking bugs.

          Elon just went to a different clown college.

          A mandatory class at both AAA game dev flavored clown college and blood diamond mines flavored clown college seems to be the art of talking up a whole lot of cool innovative features and then going hugely over budget and development time and then cutting most of those features for a late delivery date.

          (And no, I don’t care if the devs are good at their jobs but management fucked them! is the defense for AAA games. Sure, maybe that’s correct on an internal level. Doesn’t really matter for a consumable product. Would be nice if the idiot asshats got laughed out of the industry instead of new car collections, golden parachutes, but thats a whole 'nother discussion)

        • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
          19·
          3 months ago

          probably not very many because it only took a single psychotic new owner to do that when he started pulling servers out of a sacramento data center a couple years back, with no engineering and no planning.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
            3·
            3 months ago

            I am still hopeful the Twitter HQ will become a homeless shelter one way or another: Looks like Musky boy just hasn’t been paying rent, so, fingers crossed.

      • xavier666@lemm.eeEnglish
        15·
        3 months ago

        I remember a year back they just turned “off” their microservice architechture (Musk: “Why are we burning so much money in this microservice?”), or the part which allows for autoscaling as per incoming load. So the servers just reached 100% utilization and crashed.

      • blackbelt352@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        3 months ago

        Its probably just… a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

        So a Group Hug of Death.

      • WatDabney@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.

        I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1651·
    3 months ago

    Musk repeated the DDOS claim when the Space finally began around 8:40PM ET. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.

    So not only is he fabricating the DDOS out of thin air, but he just assumes out of nowhere that it’s politically motivated by the “opposition” to silence Trump - when Trump is vomiting nonsense that blankets the media 24/7 and this would do absolutely nothing to prevent Trump from exposing himself to the unwilling public. Galaxy brain genius logic right there.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      116·
      3 months ago

      He’s just trying to avoid having to admit that X is an unreliable platform due to him firing all the people that kept it stable. That would mean having to admit his own decisions are not always perfect, and someone of his temperament can’t admit that.

    • bluemellophone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      571·
      3 months ago

      A live stream with tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers is, almost by definition, a scheduled DDOS. Even Apple struggled for years to get it right for their WWDC Keynote events back when they were live.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
        11·
        3 months ago

        I didn’t think Twitter Spaces was anything but audio, though? Like they’re not streaming 8k video over here like Apple, it’s likely garbage phone audio. No?

        • odelik@lemmy.todayEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          It’s not just the data transfer. It’s also number of connections and the combined load. Scaling theese kind of things can be a nightmare for games doing an auth workflow on launch day and that’s largely just text connections over REST.

          Musk was an idiot and fired everybody that could have helped prevent/minimize the impact.

    • Petter1@lemm.eeEnglish
      101·
      3 months ago

      Most likely a dev did not want to get fired so he put the blame on a unknown bad actor instead and musk believed, lol

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        3 months ago

        Or Musk has sycophants running IT who can’t tell the difference.

        “So I’ve got this script that will make 20k simultaneous requests and average the response time to determine if we’re being DDOSed. Someone’s got it out for us because there’s a short DDOS attack every single time I run the script! These guys are good, whoever they are! I’ll trace some IPs… Oh shit. The DDOS is coming from inside the building! Better fire some more people. And don’t worry, I’ll be running my DDOS detector script a lot for the interview to make sure we don’t get attacked!”

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Dude if there’s one thing we’ve done it’s listen to far too much of the drivel that man has to say.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    1133·
    3 months ago

    Did Trump tell him how rude it was to start 42 minutes late due to technical issues, or is Musk a white man?

    • Ech@lemm.eeEnglish
      22·
      3 months ago

      Trump didn’t cause it, so he had no need to project.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      3 months ago

      A real missed opportunity to wait 3 more minutes at wait for his presidential number. Or wait 3 more years for him to be dead.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
      510·
      3 months ago

      or is Musk a white man?

      Couldn’t possibly be because he’s not only one of the wealthiest people on Earth, but also Trump’s biggest and most vocal supporter? Nono, must be racism. That makes way more sense.

      • UmeU@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        3 months ago

        Or maybe a little from column A and a little from column B

  • Meron35@lemmy.worldEnglish
    87·
    3 months ago

    X is reeling this morning after its website crashed last night due to an orchestrated attack on its servers during its Elon / Trump interview. A spokesperson for X said that the attack seemed to have been orchestrated by a foreign state actor. “We are currently looking for a group of roughly 900,000 people who could have carried out such an attack to silence Trump.” The spokesperson said it was clearly a foreign nation. “X couldn’t possibly have failed due to too many concurrent listeners. According to our latest figures, there are only 10 actual people who aren’t bots that still use X, 5 of which are confused and still think it’s Twitter.” Tech experts said that they had never seen such a sophisticated and well organised attempt to flood the servers, using millions of different points of attack. The experts say the attack was highly organised. “In order to get millions of computers to participate at the same time, the perpetrators harnessed social media to encourage people to flood the servers, and overload the website. This was sophisticated stuff.” “They announced their attack day months ago, and then worked methodically to make sure everyone remembered the attack date.” “The perpetrators must have known that no computer server can withstand the load of an entire nation trying to access the same website at the same time on the same day.” —

  • ainokea@lemmy.worldEnglish
    661·
    3 months ago

    “Trump is slurring in a way I’ve never heard from him before,” remarked podcaster Susan Simpson. “Elon sounds like this is maybe the third or fourth time he’s had a conversation with a fellow human.”

    This is my favorite comment

      • downpunxx@fedia.ioOP
        22·
        3 months ago

        “ReTruthed” this was posted by Kamala’s team on Trumps social media site about a minute while it was happening, hahahahaha, it’s the whole two hands chefs makeout, they had this locked and loaded

        • Drunemeton@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I mean at this point the weird and creepy Donald Trump is becoming his own “XKCD” in that there’s a prior tweet from him that covers everything he rants about, in a very negative light.

  • eyjohn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    3 months ago

    That’s what happens when the first thing you do is fire all the Site Reliability Engineers… Apparently he stack-ranked engineers based on most lines of code (SREs generally write less code and even often delete code) and fired the lower end of that scale.

      • devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        3 months ago

        It’s always those that are well appreciated in the corporate bullshit hamster wheel.

      • EnderMB@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        I hear that an intern accidentally committed their node_modules folder, and now they’re a staff engineer responsible for the live video streaming service. What a career trajectory! 🚀

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        41·
        3 months ago

        No, those actually finish code.

        The ones who will write everything by hand.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      While it’s not LOC, you would be amazed at how many companies stack rank on stuff like number of PR’s, how many revisions are needed to merge, size of changes, etc. I’m not talking about small companies either - FAANG companies, and not just one.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    401·
    3 months ago

    Could it be that Lonnie is a lying liar? No, not the man who has promised “full self driving” for like a decade and still hasn’t delivered it… He’s not a lying liar, right?

    Lonnie lies like a mother fucker. But not as much as the orange shithead.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    291·
    3 months ago

    By Twitter’s standards, the “DDoS” is probably just a lot of people tuning in.

  • Lemminary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    Seems like a regular thing happening on Xitter nowadays. Another day, another heavy load that doesn’t flush, I guess.