Cyber Attack On X Disrupts Trump's Interview - Elon Musk Says

Elon Musk's much-anticipated interview with former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X faced major disruptions due to technical issues.

Scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET on August 12, 2024, the event was quickly derailed by what Musk described as a "massive DDOS attack."

This type of cyberattack, known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, involves overwhelming a site with phony traffic to knock it offline. Musk posted on X, "There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down."

Despite extensive preparations, including system tests with up to 8 million concurrent listeners earlier in the day, the platform struggled to handle the influx of users.

Social media users reported being unable to join the livestream, and outage tracker Downdetector noted a spike in accessibility issues just before the interview. However, it remains unclear whether these issues were due to a malicious attack or simply an overwhelming number of users.

The conversation eventually commenced at 8:42 p.m., nearly an hour late, and continued for another two hours. By around 9:40 p.m., approximately 1.3 million people were listening in. Throughout the discussion, Musk and Trump covered various topics, including immigration, the economy, and energy policy.

Musk praised Trump, stating, "I think we’re at a fork in the road of destiny of civilization and I think we need to take the right path and, and I think you’re the right path." Trump reciprocated the sentiment, saying Musk’s endorsement "meant a lot to me."

The event marked Trump's return to X after his account had been dormant for nearly a year. His last post was his mugshot from being processed at an Atlanta jail in the Georgia election subversion case in August of the previous year. Since resuming activity on the platform, Trump gained around 900,000 new followers.

The technical difficulties echoed a similar incident in May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign announcement on X was marred by glitches.

The Harris campaign seized the opportunity to criticize Trump and Musk, labeling them as "self-obsessed rich guys" who "cannot run a livestream in the year 2024."