Elon Musk’s interview with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump kicked off more than 40 minutes late on Monday after X, which hosted the conversation, experienced technical issues.
Musk had planned to start the broadcast at 8 p.m. EDT. Instead of launching at the scheduled time, the stream started playing low-quality background music that continued for about 42 minutes. Many users were unable to tune in, with Politico reporting that both the mobile and web versions of X experienced challenges loading the interview.
After the glitches subsided, Musk and Trump talked for more than two hours in what has been widely described as a rambling conversation. They covered topics such as immigration, climate change and inflation. The conversation frequently turned to Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and President Joe Biden.
Musk’s companies also came up. Trump referenced worker strikes at Tesla Inc., telling Musk that “you walk in, you say, ‘you want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘that’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.” This part of the conversation prompted the United Auto Workers union to file federal labor charges against Musk and Trump today.
In an Xpost published shortly after the stream began, Musk blamed the technical issues on hackers. “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” he wrote. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Other parts of X worked normally during the stream. The Verge today cited an employee of the social network as saying that there wasn’t a DDoS attack, while another staffer expressed a similar view. DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attacks are attempts by hackers to overwhelm an online service with a large number of requests.
Ahead of the livestream, Musk posted that he had planned to carry out “some system scaling tests” to evaluate X’s reliability. He claimed that the company simulated a traffic surge scenario with 8 million concurrent listeners. When the interview began on Monday evening, X disclosed that about 915,000 users were listening.
The social network also experienced technical issues last May, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched his failed White House bid in a live stream with Musk. At the time, Musk blamed the technical issues on overloaded servers.