Musk's Trump interview delayed by cyberattack

Washington: The highly anticipated interview of former US President Donald Trump by Elon Musk on the social media platform X that the latter owns was way behind schedule because of technical issues.

"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X," Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. US Eastern Time.

"Working on shutting it down."

"Worst case," he added, "we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyberattack in which an attacker overwhelms a website, server, or network resource with malicious traffic, according to one explanation.

Six minutes later, Musk, posted again: "We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today."

Three minutes later, he wrote on X, "We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter."

The former President was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter.

The ban was lifted by Musk after he bought the platform.

Trump returned in August 2023 and has posted just one message since. He remains active, however, on Truth Social, the look-alike social media platform that he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.

Trump returned to X with a flurry of posts and picked up more than 300,000 new followers taking up the total to 88.3 million followers, which is 80.8 million more than the 7.5 million he has on Truth Social.

X gives Trump a much bigger platform, which according to Musk has 600 million monthly active users (other estimates put it at 540 million).

Truth Social is much smaller -- it had only five million monthly active users according to papers it filed during its IPO in March 2024 as reported by Axios.

The vast difference in the reaches of X and Truth Social won't be lost on Trump, who pays a lot of attention to the size of the crowd for his election rallies and events.

Musk is a supporter of Trump and is likely to be a friendly interviewer, but the former President is known to be both a showman and unpredictable, and the interview will be closely followed by allies and the Harris campaign.

The Trump campaign needs a bump. Trump had the upper hand in the 2024 presidential election till President Joe Biden was in the fray. The race has changed since Biden dropped out and endorsed his deputy, Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Harris has changed the race. She has energised the Democratic Party, raised more funds and has taken the lead in polls, even in key battleground states.