Investing.com– Elon Musk claimed on Monday that social media platform X was hit with a “massive” cyberattack, amid a delay in his planned live talk with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Users were initially unable to access the X space where Musk was set to host a discussion with Trump at 8:00 PM ET (00:00 GMT), with error messages stating that the space did not exist. The talk began around 40 minutes after the initially stipulated time, with over a million listeners.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” Musk said in a post on the website. He also claimed that X had tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier in the day.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service, or DDOS attack, is a cyber crime where an attacker floods a server with high amounts of traffic to prevent users from accessing it.
Trump and Musk talk inflation, foreign policy
Speaking in what Musk touted as a “conversation,” Trump initially recounted his July 14 assassination attempt, before launching into a tirade against his opponents in the 2024 presidential race.
He criticized an allegedly loose border policy adopted by the Democrats, and also reiterated that the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars would not have happened if he was in office.
Trump outlined plans to increase domestic oil production in the U.S.- stating that increased demand for artificial intelligence was going to ramp up energy requirements.
He agreed with Musk’s point that increased government spending factored into higher inflation, and blamed the Biden administration for pushing up inflation over the past four years.
Trump is set for a showdown with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race later this year. While Trump was seen polling much better against President Joe Biden, recent polls showed Harris had closed the gap, and was even polling better than Trump in some instances, setting the stage for a tight election race.
Trump returns to Twitter after 3-year hiatus, DJT sinks
Monday’s talk showed Trump returning to X, formerly known as Twitter, after an over three-year hiatus from the website.
Trump’s account was blocked in 2021 after he was accused of inciting political violence during the 2021 Capitol attacks. Musk had restored Trump’s account after his 2022 takeover of Twitter and its subsequent rebranding to X.
Trump had barely posted on X since his account’s restoration. But he made a slew of posts on Monday ahead of his talk with Musk, promoting the talk along with his 2024 presidential bid.
Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (NASDAQ:DJT) sank over 5% after Trump returned to Twitter, given that during his hiatus, Truth Social- the social media platform operated by the company- was Trump’s go-to social media platform. His presence on Truth Social was also considered a major draw for the platform.
