Elon Musk (L) and Donald Trump (R).
David Swanson | Vincent Alban | Reuters
Elon Musk‘s much-hyped interview of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X was quickly derailed by technical glitches in the first minutes of the scheduled start time on Monday evening.
Social media users trying to log on to the event, which was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET, reported that they could not join X’s livestream platform.
Shortly after 8:20 p.m., Musk, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, blamed a cyberattack for the freezing screens. CNBC was not immediately able to independently verify whether of not an attack took place, but other parts of X continued working throughout the glitches.
Musk said that the company had tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier on Monday to preempt any technical errors and ensure X’s livestream capabilities could handle the event.
As the evening went on and the platform struggled to resolve the technical issue, Musk said that the interview would proceed at 8:30 E.T. with whichever users could successfully join the stream. He added that the “unedited audio” would be posted immediately afterwards.
After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, the conversation eventually kicked off around 8:45 pm E.T. At least one million people were tuned into the interview, according to the X Spaces tally.
“This massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” Musk said.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment about the technical delay, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to Musk’s X post.
After the conversation got underway, however, Cheung appeared to congratulate Musk and Trump for causing the crash by drawing so many people to Musk’s platform.
“BREAKING THE INTERNET!” Cheung said on X, accompanied by a photo of Trump talking into a phone on speaker.
The glitch was reminiscent of X’s technical disaster in 2023 that botched Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch announcement.
The interview was billed as a buzzy, news-making event to help the Trump campaign revive its supporters after a rattling three weeks since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee.
“I want to emphasize it’s a conversation, and it’s really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation,” Musk said at the start.
Trump then spent roughly the next 20 minutes describing the attempted assassination he survived in July in Butler, Pa., which claimed the life of an audience member at a rally.
Trump later told several of the same stories he likes to tell in public, about Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his opinion of NATO. He also made many of the same unfounded and debunked claims about immigration and crime that he typically makes on the campaign trail
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.