Surprise Attack on Interview Between Elon Musk and Donald Trump

Elon Musk, the owner of the platform X (formerly known as Twitter), declared that the social media network was hit by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack right before the scheduled interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump.

It seems X is facing a massive DDoS attack. We are working to mitigate it,

Musk posted on X on August 12.

A DDoS attack aims to overwhelm the system with large amounts of traffic, causing disruption and preventing legitimate users from accessing the service.

This incident occurred as multiple technical issues affected the live X Space conversation between Musk and Trump, scheduled for 8:00 PM Eastern Time US (00:00 UTC). Many X users complained they were unable to join.

The site displayed a “not available” message, but around 120,000 people still managed to follow. In a separate post, Musk mentioned that X had tested the system earlier in the day with 8 million concurrent listeners.

Musk finally started the interview shortly after 8:30 PM Eastern Time. He had earlier announced that the interview would “proceed with a smaller number of live listeners,” with an unedited recording to be posted “immediately thereafter.”

Opening the interview, Musk remarked:

As this attack demonstrates, there’s a lot of opposition to what Donald Trump has to say.

During the interview, Elon Musk and Donald Trump discussed various issues such as Trump’s recent assassination attempt, illegal immigration, current conflicts, US relations with other countries, inflation, environment, climate, drugs, medicine, and even Vice President Kamala Harris.

Notably, the two did not discuss Bitcoin or crypto, despite Trump previously speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference and Elon Musk’s known support.

Related: Trump Sons Promote Crypto and DeFi