As soon today’s highly-anticipated Donald Trump-Elon Musk interview went live, it crashed, preventing people from accessing and watching it live on X.

While many speculated as to the cause of this online, Elon Musk announced that it was due to a DDOS attack on the website.

Musk said that they’re working on a fix, but for now the interview would proceed with a small amount of live listeners tuning in.

Here’s what he posted on X:

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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024

In case you don’t know, a DDOS attack is a type of cyber attack that tries to crash a network by overloading it with too much traffic.

This post explained:

Explainer…

DDOS is a distributed denial of service attack.

This is a cyber attack designed to cripple a network resource (server) by overwhelming it with traffic and making it unavailable for users.

Usually a temporary + malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic.

A… https://t.co/uM8NeaI1er

— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) August 13, 2024

The cyberattack caused a 40-minute delay in the interview.

Forbes reported:

A highly anticipated interview between billionaire X owner Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump was delayed by more than 40 minutes Monday when X was unable to load the discussion—an issue Musk claimed was related to a “massive” cyberattack against the social media site.

he interview, initially scheduled for 8 p.m. EDT, began just under 45 minutes late, with Musk beginning the conversation by suggesting adversaries attacked the site to prevent Trump from being heard.

The conversation began with a discussion between Musk and Trump about last month’s assassination attempt against Trump.

Previously, many users who tried to access the interview on the audio streaming feature X Spaces were directed to a “details not available” message via the link Trump posted on his X account; by 8:30 p.m., the interview still had not begun, and hold music played as 765,000 users tuned in.

Musk tweeted the server was disrupted by a “massive [distributed denial of service] attack” X was working to shut down, adding that the interview might proceed with a small number of listeners and be posted in full later.