Elon Musk, Donald Trump event on X crashes site, Tesla CEO blames cyberattack

Elon Musk's much-hyped interview of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X was nearly derailed early on by technical glitches in the first minutes of the scheduled start time on Monday evening.

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.

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO blamed a cyberattack for freezing the X platform. CNBC was not immediately able to independently verify whether or not an attack took place, but other parts of X continued working throughout the glitches.

After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, the conversation finally began in earnest and went for more than two hours. At various points, as many as 1.3 million people appeared to be watching 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," Musk said.

In response to CNBC's request for comment on the delay, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to Musk's X post.

Yet after the conversation got underway, Cheung appeared to congratulate Musk and Trump for actually causing the crash themselves by drawing so many people to Musk's platform.

"BREAKING THE INTERNET!" he said on X, accompanied by a photo of Trump talking into a phone on speaker.

Monday's glitches were reminiscent of X's technical disaster in 2023, which botched Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign launch announcement.

This time, the event was billed as a conversation between two of the world's most influential people; something buzzy and potentially news-making that might help revive Trump's campaign.

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