Shortly before the start of a much-watched conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, users of X (formerly Twitter) were confronted with the message: “This space is not available.”

Spaces, X’s livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it didn’t work. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump’s inactive @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Twitter users said they were unable to dial in; some said their browsers crashed.

Musk, who owns X, wrote: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. We are working to stop it.” The rest of X appeared to be functioning normally, including other spaces that launched around the same time as Musk and Trump.

The interview was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. Musk said he would fix the technical difficulties so he could begin half an hour later. The problems appeared to have since been resolved, and users could join the broadcast by clicking on the link.

When X’s hold music finally stopped at 8:30 a.m. ET, a rustling noise could be heard from Trump’s microphone. Then the livestream went silent for another 10 minutes. Both the former president and Musk were muted. The interview began shortly after, and X eventually showed more than 1 million concurrent listeners.

Musk said: “The attack has overloaded all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack shows, there is a lot of resistance to people simply hearing what President Trump has to say.”

Trump said he was pleased with the mishap.

“You have broken every record with so many millions of people. We consider this an honor,” he told Musk.

The day before the event, Musk said he would “do some system scaling tests” before the chat. In his feed, several of his tweets were labeled “streaming test.” But when the interview was about to begin, there was an awkward silence about X. A Washington Post reporter tweeted in response to Musk’s disclaimer about the stress tests: “So how did they go?”

X has experienced similar failures before. The mess with Trump’s interview is reminiscent of the launch of Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign on the platform in May 2023. That conversation, too, was plagued by technical difficulties. The Florida governor was almost inaudible at the start due to harsh feedback noise. X users reported their apps crashing or logging them out while trying to listen. The feed repeatedly interrupted and then started half an hour late with less than a tenth of the original listeners. Musk admitted the event “broke the Twitter system.”

On the night of DeSantis’ rocky launch, Trump posted on its X competitor Truth Social: “Wow! DeSantis’ TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team, which maintains its own Truth Social account, reposted Trump’s remarks the night of the former president’s delayed call with Musk.

After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it as X, he cut the workforce, leaving only 20 percent of employees, and used skeleton crews in key areas such as the site’s reliability. In November of that year, he reinstated Trump, who had been banned from Twitter following the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Advertisers have fled amid a documented rise in hate speech on the social network. The billionaire has touted X as a leader in politics and free speech.