Elon Musk (L) and Donald Trump (R).
David Swanson | Vincent Alban | Reuters
Elon Musk‘s much-hyped interview of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X was quickly derailed by technical glitches in the first minutes of the scheduled start time on Monday evening.
Social media users trying to log on to the event, which was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET, reported that they could not join X’s livestream platform.
Shortly after 8:20 p.m., Musk, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, blamed a cyberattack for the freezing screens. He said that the company had tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier on Monday to preempt any technical errors and ensure X’s livestream capabilities could handle the event.
As the evening went on and the platform struggled to resolve the technical issue, Musk said that the interview would proceed at 8:30 E.T. with whichever users could successfully join the stream. He added that the “unedited audio” would be posted immediately afterwards.
After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, the conversation eventually kicked off around 8:45 pm E.T. At least one million people were tuned into the interview, according to the X Spaces tally.
Musk opened the interview by apologizing for the delay and blaming an attack against the company’s servers. There were no clear signs of an attack, however, and other parts of X continued working throughout.
“This massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” Musk said.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment about the technical delay, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to Musk’s X post blaming a potential cyberattack.
The glitch was reminiscent of X’s technical disaster in 2023 that botched Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch announcement.
The interview was billed as a buzzy, news-making event to help the Trump campaign revive its supporters after a rattling three weeks since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!” Musk wrote in a Sunday post on X, teasing the event.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.