Musk claims X hit by ‘massive DDoS attack’ delaying Trump interview

X owner Elon Musk claims the social media platform was hit with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack as his slated interview with presidential hopeful Donald Trump was set to kick off. 

“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” Musk posted to X on Aug. 12. A DDoS attack aims to flood a network or service with traffic to disrupt and deny legitimate users from being able to use it.

It comes as technical issues plagued the X Space Musk and Trump were scheduled to hold at 8:00 pm Eastern Time US as multiple X users complained they were unable to join.

The site showed the stream was “not available,” but around 120,000 still managed to join. In a separate post , Musk said X tested the system earlier in the day with 8 million concurrent listeners.

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Musk managed to start the interview shortly after 8:30 pm ET, which he earlier said would “proceed with a smaller number of live listeners” with unedited audio to be posted “immediately thereafter.”

"As this attack demonstrates, there’s a lot of opposition to what Donald Trump has to say," Musk said to open the interview.

Throughout the two-hour-long interview, Trump talked about — among other things — the attempt on his life, illegal immigration, foreign relations, and attacked President Joe Biden and his now rival presidential bidder, Kamala Harris .

Despite Trump’s pro-crypto push and Musk’s long-time love of Dogecoin ( DOGE ) — crypto wasn’t mentioned once.

Polymarket punters bet just over $1 million in all to give a 56% chance each to Trump mentioning “crypto” or “Bitcoin” as the interview started, which both quickly dropped and continued to fall throughout the interview to hit a low of 1% before the interview ended.

Ahead of the interview, European Union internal market chief Thierry Breton warned Musk in a letter that he must comply with EU laws , claiming his interview with Trump carried “a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed Breton’s letter was “an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the US.”

She claimed it ”patronizes European citizens” and suggests they’re “incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”

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Update (Aug. 13, 2:50 am UTC): This article has been updated to add comments from Elon Musk and Donald Trump.