Elon Musk’s long-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was disrupted Monday by technical issues that prevented people from joining the audio call on X’s Spaces platform.
Eighteen minutes into a call scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. EDT, Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS), a federal criminal act in which a site is flooded with data in order to overwhelm it and take it offline.
Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users before the interview, but it couldn’t immediately verify whether this was due to a malicious attack. The rest of X appeared to be operating normally, and X users were wondering if there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was simply being flooded with people trying to eavesdrop.
Musk had promoted the event earlier in the day, calling it a conversation rather than an interview. He said that X “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
At 8:42 p.m. the interview finally began. By 9:20 p.m. over 1.2 million people were listening.
X has suffered a lot technical problems since Musk took over the company. He has laid off, fired or furloughed most of the staff — including engineers tasked with keeping the site running.
Trump had previously ridiculed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as his primary campaign kicked off with a Interview May 2023 on X that was marred by malfunctions.
“Wow! DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network in May 2023. “His entire campaign is going to be a disaster. WATCH!”
The DeSantis event began with technical issues that Musk blamed on servers being overloaded by so many people trying to listen in. More than 20 minutes passed the scheduled start time, with users getting kicked off, hearing microphone feedback and hold music, and experiencing other technical issues. Listenership peaked at around 420,000.
DeSantis dropped out of the race after a disappointing showing in the Iowa caucuses.
Trump, who posts on his own social media platform Truth Social, returned to X on Monday morning, posting for the first time since his 2021 ban. The posts promoted his interview with Musk and included campaign ads.
