A 40-minute delay plagued former President Donald Trump’s live conversation with Elon Musk on X, with Musk attributing the technical difficulties to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattack. The attack, according to Musk, overwhelmed X’s servers with massive amounts of data, disrupting the start of the livestream.
Musk explained that the DDoS attack “saturated all of our data lines” with hundreds of gigabits of traffic. Despite previous testing for up to 8 million concurrent listeners, the event peaked at 1.3 million live listeners due to the issues. Musk decided to proceed with a smaller audience and promised to post the unedited audio afterward.
The glitches echo the troubled launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid on X in May 2023, which also faced significant delays and technical problems. Musk hinted that the DDoS attack was a sign of opposition to Trump’s message but did not provide verification.
Following the event, Musk extended an invitation to Vice President Kamala Harris for a similar live conversation.
