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 Spaces Musk and Trump were scheduled to hold at 8:00 pm Eastern Time as multiple X users complained they could not 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 eight 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 massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said when opening the interview.
Throughout the two-hour-long interview, Trump talked about — among other things — the attempt on his life, illegal immigration and foreign relations, and attacked President Joe Biden and his now rival presidential candidate, Vice President 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 on a 56% chance of 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.
Before the interview, Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union, 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.