UK

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.

Former president Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk
Former president Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk (Matt Rourke/AP)
By Rob Freeman, PA

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!”.