Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s scheduled interview with Elon Musk on the billionaire entrepreneur’s social media platform X on Monday evening ran into technical difficulties at the outset, with many users unable to access the live stream and Musk postponing the event.
The site showed that the page was “not available” shortly after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. ET for some users. As of 8:20 p.m. ET, the page listed about 214,000 participants, though the event had not yet started, presumably due to the technical problems.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk wrote in an X post at 8:18 p.m., referring to a type of cyberattack in which a server or network is flooded with traffic in an attempt to shut it down.
“Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
He said minutes later, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”
Elon Trump interview off to a great start <a href=”https://t.co/JoY2sXYgF4″>pic.twitter.com/JoY2sXYgF4</a>
—@esjesjesj
The snafu recalled a similar event in May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suffered a chaotic start to his bid for the Republican presidential nomination due to glitches on the platform.
The hour-long broadcast lost sound for extended stretches, and thousands of users were either unable to join or were dropped. DeSantis ultimately lost the nomination to Trump.
At the time, Trump mocked DeSantis on his own social media platform, Truth Social: “My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!)” Trump posted. “Yours does not.”
Ahead of Monday’s event, Musk had written, “Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation.”
The interview was a fresh opportunity for Trump to seize the limelight at a time when his campaign is facing new headwinds.
His Democratic rival for the Nov. 5 election, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, has erased Trump’s lead in opinion polls and energized Democratic voters with a series of high-energy rallies. Harris’s momentum could get another boost from the Democratic National Convention next week in Chicago.
Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday morning for the first time in a year, posting a video highlighting his claim without evidence that the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.
He quickly followed with a half-dozen other posts, reviving an account that served as a main method of communication in previous campaigns and his four years in the White House, including his followers’ Jan. 6 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
