Elon Musk’s eagerly anticipated interview with former President Donald Trump was disrupted by technical issues on Monday, leaving many unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform. The conversation, scheduled to start at 8 p.m. EDT, faced complications just 18 minutes in when Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS). This type of attack, a federal criminal act, involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm and incapacitate it.
Downdetector, an outage tracker, noted a spike in reports of X being inaccessible prior to the interview. However, it remained unconfirmed whether this was due to a malicious attack. The remainder of X seemed to be functioning normally, leading users to speculate whether the issue stemmed from a DDOS attack or an overload from the number of people trying to join the conversation.
Throughout the day, Musk had been promoting the event, referring to it as a conversation rather than an interview. He claimed that X had tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier in the day.
The interview eventually commenced at 8:42 p.m. By approximately 9:40 p.m., around 1.3 million people were listening in. Trump praised Musk for “breaking every record in the book tonight” due to the high volume of people attempting to tune in.
Since Musk’s takeover of the company, X has been plagued with various technical issues. Musk has significantly reduced the staff, including many engineers responsible for maintaining the site’s functionality.
Trump had previously mocked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis following a glitch-ridden interview on X during the launch of DeSantis’s primary campaign in May 2023. “Wow! The DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network at the time. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
The DeSantis event similarly experienced technical difficulties that Musk attributed to overloaded servers from high listener demand. Users faced issues such as getting kicked off, microphone feedback, hold music, and other glitches, with the listener count peaking around 420,000. DeSantis eventually exited the race following a lackluster performance in Iowa’s kickoff caucuses.
Returning to X on Monday morning, Trump posted for the first time since his 2021 ban, promoting his interview with Musk and featuring campaign advertisements.
