Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on the billionaire entrepreneur’s social media platform X was postponed due to technical issues.
The site reported that it “became unavailable” to some users shortly after the scheduled start time of 8pm Eastern Time (1am UK time), even though over 115,000 people had successfully logged in.
Musk then tweeted: “Apparently there was a massive DDOS attack against X. We are currently working to shut it down.
In worst case scenario we will continue with a small number of live listeners and make the conversation public at a later date.”
A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack targets a website, computer, or online service by switching it offline. .
This is done by flooding the target with so many requests that it exhausts its capacity and prevents it from responding to legitimate requests.
The event started about 40 minutes late, with Musk opening the chat by talking about the Trump assassination attempt.
The Republican presidential candidate told Musk that he intends to return in October to Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman was shot on July 13.
Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally, killing one person and wounding several others.
“We’re going to be back in Butler. We’re going to be back in October,” Trump said. “The people of Butler are amazing.”
The former US president — whose X (then Twitter) account was suspended in 2021 after his supporters stormed the US Capitol — returned to the stage and published some posts before the event.
For Musk, the issue will bring back bad memories of May 2023, when then-Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got off to a tumultuous start in the race for the Republican presidential nomination due to platform glitches.
The hour-long broadcast featured extended audio cuts, with thousands of users unable to join or being excluded.
At the time, Trump mocked DeSantis on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“My Red Button is Bigger, Better, More Powerful and It Works (Truth!),” President Trump posted.
“It’s not yours.”
