Former President Donald Trump’s highly-anticipated interview with Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk crashed on Monday night after the social media platform experienced a “massive DDOS attack.”
According to The Daily Wire, hundreds of thousands of users were listening to the live interview before it crashed shortly after it started at approximately 8:00 p.m.
Addressing the problem on X, formerly Twitter, Musk wrote, “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.”
Musk explained that the social media platform had “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners” prior to Monday night’s interview. The X owner also noted that the platform would move forward with the interview with a smaller number of concurrent listeners around 8:30 p.m. Musk added that the unedited audio of the interview would be posted for other users “immediately thereafter.”
Addressing social media users after the delay, Musk offered an apology for the technical difficulties and explained that Monday’s “massive” distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack reveals the lengths the former president’s adversaries will go to in order to silence him.
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“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said.
The Daily Wire reported that despite the initial technical difficulties, Trump’s interview with Musk became the largest X-Space event, with over one million social media users watching at any time throughout the interview.
Early Tuesday morning, X shared statistics from the interview, tweeting, “Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views. During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on X, generating a total of 998 million views.”
Musk also highlighted the massive reach of Monday’s interview with the former president. The Tesla CEO and X owner tweeted, “Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion.”
According to The Daily Wire, Trump’s interview with Musk lasted for over two hours and included topics such as the July 13 assassination attempt, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ administration, illegal immigration, and government spending.
