Billionaire Elon Musk was set to hold an online event with former US President Donald Trump on Musk’s social media site X, but the interview was delayed by technical difficulties, NBC News reported.
The discussion between the two was scheduled to begin at 8:00 p.m. ET but had not begun as of 8:40 p.m.
Musk said in a post on X that he planned to proceed with a smaller number of concurrent listeners and then post the unedited audio immediately after.
He claimed that the technical difficulties were caused by a “massive DDOS attack on X,” referencing a “distributed denial-of-service” attack in which hostile users try to overwhelm a system to cause chaos.
Some X users, however, had doubts about Musk’s claim and said they believed the problem was X’s technical capabilities, rather than an attack.
The tech problems echoed similar difficulties from May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his Republican presidential bid on X and was repeatedly disrupted because the site’s servers apparently couldn’t handle the surge in traffic.
The interview with Musk would have marked Trump’s triumphant return to X, formerly known as Twitter.
The social media site’s previous leadership infamously permanently suspended Trump’s account in the wake of the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol. Several other social media platforms followed suit.
Musk reinstated Trump’s account in November of 2022 after running a poll on his Twitter account, asking users whether he should do so.
Trump initially stated that he would not return to Twitter even if his account is reinstated. However, he made a single post on X last August, which included his Fulton County mugshot after he was booked in Georgia for his criminal indictment.
On Monday, Trump posted multiple times on X, hours before the discussion with Musk was set to begin.