Elon Musk’s highly anticipated interview with US Presidential candidate Donald Trump on the X social media platform Monday night was impacted by technical glitches and what the Tesla CEO said was a cyberattack.
Scheduled to start at 8 PM ET, many users reported that they were unable to access X’s livestream platform.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏,” Musk Tweeted at 8:18PM ET. “Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Musk, who is CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, did not provide any technical details on the claimed cyberattack.
“My apologies for the late start,” Musk said as the interview kicked off. “We unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service attack against our servers and saturated all of our data lines…like basically hundreds of gigabits of data were saturated.”
“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk added.
Some X users speculated that it could possibly have just been a massive audience attempting to view the stream that the platform could not keep up with, while some suggested it was a nation-state attack.
“Is it an actual DDOS Attack or just a lot of people trying to get into the Space causing a Denial of Service?” questioned X user OSINTdefender.
“This scale of DDOS attack likely has nation-state backing,” commented Michael Flynn, a retired US Army lieutenant general who briefly served as national security advisor to President Trump.
It’s unclear if X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, will provide share details on the incident, but SecurityWeek will provide updates if any additional information is provided.
Over the weekend, Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, suggesting that Iranian actors were behind an email account compromise that resulted in the access to and distribution of sensitive internal documents.
