Elon Musk blames cyber attack for delay to X interview with Donald Trump
Listeners were kept waiting for almost 45 minutes for the ‘conversation’ between the site’s owner and the former president.
Your support helps us to tell the story
As your White House correspondent, I ask the tough questions and seek the answers that matter.
Your support enables me to be in the room, pressing for transparency and accountability. Without your contributions, we wouldn't have the resources to challenge those in power.
Your donation makes it possible for us to keep doing this important work, keeping you informed every step of the way to the November election
Andrew Feinberg
White House Correspondent
Technical problems left X users waiting almost 45 minutes for an interview between the social media site’s owner Elon Musk and former US president Donald Trump.
The interview, billed as “a conversation” by Mr Musk, was due to start at 1am on Tuesday, but the link to join cut out at regular intervals.
Those able to access the interview space online were greeted with music rather than a conversation between the two men.
Mr Musk blamed an attack on X’s system for preventing access to his conversation with the Republican presidential candidate.
Posting on the platform formerly known as Twitter, he said: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
A distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attack is an attempt to disrupt the traffic of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
Mr Musk posted: “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today”.
He appeared to accuse the Democrats of attacking X when a user posted “Is Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!”. Mr Musk replied “Yeah”.
He said he would start the conversation at 1.30am with smaller listener numbers.
When it started just after 1.40am, Mr Musk said the “massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what president Trump has to say.”
Mr Trump congratulated Mr Musk “on breaking every record in the book tonight” with the number of people trying to get in to listen.
His Democratic rival Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign highlighted Mr Trump’s past comments about X when his former Republican presidential rival Ron DeSantis suffered technical issues when he launched his campaign on the platform.
The campaign used its account on Mr Trump’s Truth Social platform to repeat his post from May 2023: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”.
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.