X owner Elon Musk said that a “massive” cyberattack delayed his Spaces interview with former President Donald Trump on Monday night — while others noted the disruption was eerily reminiscent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ glitch-filled presidential campaign launch on the platform the year before.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS [Distributed Denial of Service] attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” Musk posted 18 minutes after the scheduled start time for the interview.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he said, claiming to have tested the Space earlier Monday with “8 million concurrent listeners.”
Reps for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but company insiders spilled to the Verge that likely no such cyberattack took place.
One insider went as far as to say there was a “99% chance” that Musk had lied about it.
The conversation kicked off a little after 8:40 p.m., with the X owner saying, “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”
More than 1 million listeners eventually tuned in.
Netizens still speculated that the botched start to the more than two-hour interview was more likely the result of technical issues.
The screw-up also left an opening for the Harris-Walz campaign to strike.
“Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com,” said spokesperson Joseph Costello in a statement.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” Costello added.
The Democratic campaign also took to Trump’s Truth Social platform to repost the former president’s scathing remarks about a similar conversation that occurred between Musk and DeSantis on May 24, 2023.
“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!” the 45th president gloated in a message the same day.
That Musk-led interview crashed after just 20 minutes with more than 400,000 listeners.
The Florida governor had planned on using the novel platform to announce his presidential run, alongside staunch backers like venture capital investor David Sacks.
Both Musk and Sacks, who initially backed DeSantis in the 2024 GOP primary, have since endorsed Trump, 78, for the presidency.
The Tesla CEO declined to donate to any candidate during the Republican primary — but pledged to donate tens of millions to a tech industry-linked super PAC working to help re-elect Trump.
Earlier on Monday, a top European Union official had warned Musk about potentially contributing to the “amplification of harmful content” by broadcasting the lengthy interview with Trump.
The official, Thierry Breton, posted a letter on X that he had sent to Musk, warning him against not complying with EU law.
The Trump campaign fired back in a statement of their own that the European official and others should “mind their own business instead of trying to meddle in the U.S. Presidential election.”
“Let us be very clear: the European Union is an enemy of free speech and has no authority of any kind to dictate how we campaign,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in the statement.
The FBI also announced a probe Monday into the alleged hacking of documents belonging to the Trump campaign after receiving anonymous emails that included internal documents related to the vetting of now-vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
