Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on the billionaire entrepreneur’s social media platform X has suffered technical issues with some users having difficulty accessing the live stream.
The site showed that the page was “not available” shortly after the scheduled start time of 8pm Eastern Time (1am UK time) for some users, though more than 115,000 people appeared to have joined successfully.
Musk then tweeted: “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.”
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A Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is designed to force a website, computer, or online service offline.
This is done by flooding the target with many requests, consuming its capacity and rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests.
Minutes before the event was due to start, Musk posted that he was holding a conversation with Trump, not an interview, adding: “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.”
The former US president – whose account on X (when it was known as Twitter) was suspended in 2021 after his supporters stormed the US Capitol – returned to the platform ahead of the event, making several posts.
The issues will bring back bad memories for Musk from May 2023, when Florida Governor 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.
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.”