Cyberattack, inflation, immigration: Six takeaways from Trump-Musk chat

 We take a look at the key highlights from Trump-Musk interview that took place on X on Monday.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, 78, participated in a two-hour interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, 53, on Musk's social media platform X on Monday. The event, which was delayed by over 40 minutes due to technical issues, was promoted by Trump’s campaign team as “the biggest interview in history.” Here are some of the key takeaways:

DDoS ‘massive cyberattack’

About 15 minutes after the interview was scheduled to begin, thousands of people who were trying to join the conversation on X began to complain that they couldn’t hear what was happening. Others reported being confronted with an error message which read: “This Space is not available,” referring to X’s live audio streaming feature, Spaces.

Musk blamed a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that had overwhelmed the servers.

In a DDoS attack, hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when it can no longer cope with the scale of data requested.

“The attack saturated all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honoured to have this conversation,” Musk said.

He added that the conversation was meant to be informal, to help “open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.