Elon Musk’s interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was marred by technical problems that the tech billionaire attributed to a cyberattack.

The lengthy conversation, which Musk said was aimed at “open-minded, independent voters,” began more than 40 minutes late because many users had difficulty accessing it.

Mr Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), said a distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attack had “overloaded all of our data lines”.

Towards the end of the two-hour conversation, he reiterated his support for Trump and called on moderate voters to support the Republican’s campaign.

“Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next,” Musk said.

The conversation began less promisingly.

When the conversation was scheduled to begin more than 20 minutes after it was scheduled to begin and many users were having trouble accessing the livestream, Musk posted a post blaming the problems on “a massive DDOS attack on X.”

Distributed denial of services attacks – or DDoS attacks – are attempts to overload a website, making it difficult to use or inaccessible.

As the conversation between the two men began, Musk said the alleged cyberattack showed that there was a resistance in the United States to listening to what Trump had to say.

It is unclear what caused the technical problems with the X-Audio call or who is behind a suspected attack.

“A DDoS attack sends a very large number of signals to an online target in order to disrupt it,” Anthony Lim, director of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies in Singapore, told the BBC.

“It is unlikely that a single service or feature of a website would be affected.”

Mr Lim added that it was possible that a large number of listeners had temporarily crashed the service.

However, Andrew Hay of IT company Damovo said the problems could have been caused by a cyberattack: “I believe the DDoS attack targeted the broadcast part of X’s service without significantly impacting the core functionality for everyone else on the site.”

“Launching a large-scale DDoS attack is relatively easy. It requires either a large number of compromised systems or identifying a technical flaw in the target to exhaust its resources,” he added.

In a subsequent post, Mr Musk said the system was tested with “8 million concurrent listeners” before his live chat.

During the conversation, X Spaces showed about one million listeners

The bumpy start was reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ entry into the race for the White House in May 2023, which Held on to X and saw the livestream disruption.

The conversation about X comes as Trump, the former president and Republican presidential candidate, seeks to refocus his re-election campaign.

Opinion polls suggest that the Democrats’ nomination of Ms Harris has intensified the close battle for the White House.

Harris’ campaign is experiencing strong momentum after she emerged as the Democratic nominee following President Joe Biden’s exit from the race last month.

Next week, Ms Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, could get another boost at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The Trump campaign has trolled Harris for not giving interviews and answering few questions from reporters since accepting the nomination last month.

During the interview on Monday, Trump said it was “nice to have a forum like this” on X where he could speak at length.

Mr Musk, on whose platform the event took place, has gained increasing influence in politics.

He has more than 190 million followers on X, where he regularly participates in political controversies.

In addition, he has recently become involved in a new political committee that supports Trump’s campaign.

But after his conversation with Trump, Musk posted on X “Excited to have Kamala join X Spaces,” apparently an invitation to Vice President Kamala Harris to attend a similar event.

The relationship between Musk and Trump has changed over the years and has been the subject of frequent online heated exchanges in the past.

But the conversation between the two on Monday was friendly and never hostile.

Trump, who is skeptical about electric cars and had previously announced that he would cut government subsidies, praised the carmaker Tesla, which is also owned by Musk.

He recently said he had “no choice” but to support electric vehicles because of Musk’s support, calling Tesla’s product “great” on Monday.

Mr Musk said he would be willing to offer help to the Trump administration with a proposed “commission on government efficiency.”

Ahead of the high-profile conversation on the social media site, which was accessed by European users, EU Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton told Musk in a letter that he had to comply with EU digital content law.

The EU suspects X of violating its rules, including those aimed at combating illegal content and disinformation.

In response, X CEO Linda Yaccarino called this “an unprecedented attempt to extend a law that is supposed to apply in Europe to political activities in the United States.”

“In addition, European citizens are being patronised by being made to believe that they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”

Monday marked something of a return to X/Twitter for Trump after he was removed from the platform shortly after the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.

Other than a flood of campaign ads on Trump’s account on Monday, he had posted only once a year since Mr Musk reactivated his X account in 2022 – his mugshot and a link to his campaign page.

It is not clear whether Trump, who posts frequently on his website Truth Social, would continue to post more frequently on X.

Monday’s interview touched on a range of topics, from the assassination attempt on Trump last month at a rally in Pennsylvania to his desire for the U.S. to have an Iron Dome-style missile defense system modeled on Israel to a central issue of his campaign – immigration.

Trump also considered closing the federal Department of Education and transferring responsibility for it to the states as one of his first official acts if he wins the election in November.

The Republican candidate also spoke about Biden’s decision to drop out of the race after a disastrous performance in the debate and pressure from vulnerable Democratic lawmakers, calling it “a coup.”

In an interview with CBS over the weekend, Biden said he resigned out of fear of an intra-party fight over his candidacy that would be a “real distraction” before the election.

In a statement after the event, the Harris campaign described Musk and Trump as two “self-centered rich guys who will betray the middle class and won’t even be able to host a livestream in 2024.”

João da Silva contributed to this report