Musk Says Massive Cyberattack Delayed Trump Interview

Users were unable to access the former president’s ‘X Space’ where his interview is set to stream live.

(Left) Former President Donald Trump prepares to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas on Aug. 6, 2022. (Right) Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on May 2, 2022. Brandon Bell, Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

Elon Musk’s planned Aug. 12 interview with Former President Donald Trump hit a roadblock after the owner said the site was facing a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, preventing the X Space from going live.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” Musk, the owner of X, said in a post.

“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

Nearly 40 minutes past the planned start time, Musk’s voice finally broadcast in the Spaces room dedicated to the interview with more than a million users listening live.

Musk said the attack demonstrated that there are those who want to prevent the public hearing from Trump.

Twitter tested its Spaces platform with 8 million concurrent users earlier in the day, according to Musk.

“We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” Musk said on X.

The FBI said on Monday that it’s investigating the hacking of the Trump campaign by Iran. Microsoft reported on Aug. 9 that Iranian hackers had targeted a U.S. presidential campaign. The Trump campaign later confirmed that it had been hacked.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had challenged Trump in the Republican primary, faced a similar disruption when he launched his campaign with Musk on X.

The interview was scheduled on the heels of Trump’s return to the platform for the first time since August 2023. He posted a campaign advertisement earlier in the day.

After making his return in a year to the social platform X, former President Donald Trump planned an Aug. 12 interview with owner Elon Musk. The two were set to have an “unscripted interview with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining,” Musk wrote earlier in the day.

He had said the platform was conducting “some system scaling tests” to handle the anticipated traffic, which saw more than 200,000 participants within minutes after the Space was posted to the platform.

Downdetector, which measures website traffic to detect when sites go down, indicated that users were reporting issues with the website after 8 p.m. on Aug. 12.

A DDOS attack is a malicious attempt to block or disrupt servers, websites, or networks by overwhelming them with traffic.