New York, US

Elon Musk's highly-anticipated interview with former US President Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter) was off to a shaky start due to a possible cyberattack. 

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According to the Tesla CEO, the interview, which was more of an informal talk with the Republican presidential candidate, was halted due to a "Distributed Denial-of-Service" (DDOS) attack. 

"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down," Musk, the world's richest man, wrote on the platform. 

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

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Notably, the event started almost 40 minutes late before Musk informed about the alleged cyberattack. According to X, at one point more than 960,000 accounts were on Spaces watching the interview. 

After the stuttering start, Trump began by "congratulating" Musk for "Breaking every record" for the large number of listeners that had joined the event. 

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Elon, meanwhile, started by asking the former prez about the assassination attempt which took place exactly a month ago in Butler County, Pennsylvania.   

After the attack, the SpaceX CEO endorsed Trump as the president of the country, having made a significant financial contribution to the latter's campaign just days before. 

Musk has been using his platform to actively campaign for Trump by terming Democrat candidate, Kamala Harris, a threat to the country and the globe. Trump, meanwhile, is looking to gain some steam after his campaign seemingly lost ideas after Joe Biden's decision to quit the re-election bid. 

Watch | Trump rally shooting: Elon Musk condemns attack endorses Trump

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What is a DDoS attack?

In a DDoS attack, the target server is flooded by a high volume of traffic that makes it difficult for the website or in this particular case, X, to function properly. 

The servers are capable of handling a lot of data but notorious actors, using multiple compromised networks flood the infrastructure of the target, and use the opportunity to exploit the prey's network for important data. 

Also read | Elon Musk a ‘teenager on the bus with no headphones’, should face ‘arrest warrant’, says ex-Twitter chief

Typical countermeasures against DDoS attacks are filters which discern real requests from fake ones.

(With inputs from agencies)