Musk’s interview with Trump marred by technical glitches

This combination of photos shows former President Donald Trump during rally in Minden, Nev., Oct. 8, 2022, left, and Elon Musk in Wilmington, Del., July 12, 2021. (AP Photo)

Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform.

Eighteen minutes into a conversation that was supposed to start at 8 p.m. EDT., Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS), which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and knock it offline.

Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users starting before the interview but it could not be immediately verified whether this was due to a malicious attack. The rest of X appeared to be operating normally, and X users questioned whether there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was just overwhelmed with people trying to listen in.

Musk had been promoting the event earlier in the day, calling it a conversation rather than an interview. He said X “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”

FILE – Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks with President Donald Trump, May 30, 2020, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

At 8:42 p.m., the interview finally began. By around 9:40 p.m., some 1.3 million people were listening in. Trump congratulated Musk “on breaking every record in the book tonight” with the number of people trying to get in to listen.

X has suffered a host of technical issues since Musk took over the company. He has fired, laid off or driven out most of its staff — including engineers tasked with keeping the site running.

Trump had previously mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when his primary campaign launched with a May 2023 interview on X that was marred by glitches.

“Wow! The DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote on May, 2023, on his Truth Social network. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”

The DeSantis event started with technical problems that Musk said were due to straining servers because so many people were trying to listen in. More than 20 minutes passed beyond the scheduled start time with users getting kicked off, hearing microphone feedback and hold music and dealing with other technical problems. The number of listeners listed topped out at around 420,000.

DeSantis dropped out of the race after a disappointing finish in Iowa’s kickoff caucuses.

Trump, who has been posting on his own social media site, Truth Social, returned to the X Monday morning, where he posted for the first time since he was banned in 2021. The posts promoted his interview with Musk and featured campaign ads.