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..

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But even with that preparation, he was unable to deal with the tech problems that followed, as according to Reuters, around 1.3 million people listened in at one point.

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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.

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

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.

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".

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The document discusses various input and output devices used with CAD/CAM systems. It describes keyboards, mice, joysticks, light pens, scanners, touch screens, microphones, and trackballs as common input devices used to enter data and instructions into the computer. Output devices mentioned include monitors for displaying processed information, printers for printed hard copies, speakers for playing audio, and plotters for high-quality printed outputs like drawings.Read less

It seemed to be a cautionary tale that Mr Musk was heeding - the day before his interview with Mr Trump he said he would be performing "system scaling tests" on "Spaces" - the name for X's audio chat feature.

But, much like his ultimately doomed campaign, problems plagued the interview from the outset. Gremlins meant Mr DeSantis had to sit and wait before he could even give his speech.

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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".

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.

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

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.

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

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“While we cannot definitively state the underlying cause of the event, Cisco ThousandEyes did not observe traffic conditions typically present during a DDoS attack, such as network congestion, packet loss, and elevated latency," it said.

"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.

Mr Musk's interview with the presidential hopeful was delayed by 40 minutes while the platform struggled with tech issues.

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

"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."

The network intelligence company, Cisco ThousandEyes, also said there was a lack of evidence pointing to a cyber attack.

He may be the richest man in the world, but - as his glitch-prone conversation with Donald Trump showed - it seems Elon Musk still can't overcome X's technical problems.