(Credit: Win McNamee / Employee / Getty Images News via Getty Images)
Technical difficulties delayed former President Donald Trump's live conversation with Elon Musk on X by over 40 minutes.
Musk blamed the issues on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, in which a bad actor seeks to overload a target server with traffic, rendering it unusable. His claims could not be verified.
"We unfortunately had a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against our servers [that] saturated all of our data lines," Musk said when he finally joined the call. "Hundreds of gigabits of data were saturated. We think we've overcome most of that, and so it's now time to proceed."
Musk says X tested the technology earlier that day for up to 8 million concurrent listeners. After experiencing issues, he said he would "proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners...and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter." However, the event attracted 1.3 million live listeners, according to Reuters.
The glitches are reminiscent of when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his presidential bid on X in May 2023, which began 25 minutes late. The audio feed cut out at times, and thousands of users could not join or were dropped from the call. At the time, Musk attributed the issues to having too many attendees and "kind of melting the servers," according to The Guardian.
It's unclear if internal server issues also played a role for the Trump event. Musk only mentioned an external DDoS attack, claiming it proves "there's a lot of opposition to people hearing what President Trump has to say."
Once the call got underway, Trump proceeded with his usual talking points on immigration, pinning illegal border crossings on Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk rarely challenged the former president as he moved from topic to topic, including unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rigged, a proposal to move to a state-run education system, the potential for nuclear power, and praising Musk for firing workers who strike.
When users click on the recording of the conversation, X surfaces a link to donate to the Trump campaign. Musk endorsed Trump for president and created a super PAC to help fund his campaign, Fortune reports. Prior to the event, Trump posted on X account for the first time since posting his mugshot in August 2023, hoping to boost attendance and promote his campaign.
After the event, Musk tweeted that he would be "happy to host" VP Harris for a similar live conversation.