Donald Trump’s return to the social media platform X, more than three years after he was banned following his supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, crashed spectacularly Monday as his scheduled live X interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk was beset with technical glitches.

The former president’s return to his once-favored online soapbox — where he has a following of more than 88 million — should have offered him the opportunity to pitch his message directly to a vast swath of voters as he faces a tight race against the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

For half an hour, hundreds of thousands of viewers who were able to log in to what Trump billed as “the greatest interview history” heard elevator music. Then silence.

Musk blamed the difficulties on hackers.

“There appears to be a massive (distributed denial-of-service) attack on X,” Musk posted on his platform. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

After a nearly 45-minute delay, the conversation started and Musk apologized for the late start, saying X’s servers had been attacked and hundreds of gigabytes of data were saturated. “There’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said.

Until Monday, Trump had posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter only once since Musk bought the site and reinstated his account in November 2022. But the GOP nominee is now struggling to regain campaign momentum as polls show his lead narrowing since President Joe Biden stepped aside July 21 and endorsed Harris.

Ahead of the scheduled conversation, Musk said that X was conducting “some system scaling tests” in an attempt to accommodate the high volume of people expected to tune in.

The technical difficulties hearkened back to the challenges Musk had hosting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch in May when his “live chat” on Twitter Spaces crashed after about 20 minutes of mostly silence.

The technical glitches were an embarrassment for Musk. Trump’s return to X was supposed to provide the Tesla chief executive an opportunity to revive his struggling social media platform and bolster its status as a central hub for political news.

Since Musk acquired X for $44 billion in 2022 and set about transforming its ethos and mechanics — slashing staff and cutting content moderation — the site has lost some followers and advertisers. It also faces heightened competition from rival platforms, such as ByteDance’s TikTok, Meta’s Threads and Truth Social, the site Trump launched in 2022 in response to his Facebook and Twitter ban.

Musk wrote on X that the 8 p.m. EDT interview would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining.” Trump said it would be “the biggest interview in history.”

Ammar Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesman, dismissed the X event as a platform for lies, characterizing Trump and his “billionaire sugar daddy” as “infamous for their relationship with the truth.”

“After ignoring swing voters for 9 days and counting, an angry Trump is taking his backward agenda of hate and division to a Twitter conversation with fellow extremist Elon Musk,” Moussa said in a statement. “Elon, for his part, knows Trump is a man who he can do ‘business’ with, who can be bought, and who will give him vast tax handouts.”

Trump, who has long presented himself as the victim of persecution from the political and media elite, posted a flurry of posts Monday on X, starting witha 2 1/2-minute campaign video that juxtaposed large crowds of his supporters alongside news reports of FBI agents searching his Mar-a-Lago estate and his prosecution by the Justice Department.

“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” Trump said in a voiceover. “The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it. The more that a broken system tells you that you’re wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead.”

Musk is likely to be an unorthodox interviewer.

A once-frequent Democratic supporter who backed Biden in the last presidential election, the entrepreneur has drifted rightward since 2020 and become a frequent troll of left-wing politics and what he dubs the “woke mind virus.” Last month, Musk spoke out against a new California law that prohibits mandating that teachers notify families about student gender identity changes and announced he’s moving X and SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas.

After the former president survived an assassination attempt at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally a month ago, Musk said he “fully” endorsed Trump. He also helped set up a political action committee to financially support Trump’s campaign.

Over the last year, X has played a key role in the presidential campaign.

Last month, Biden announced he was suspending his presidential campaign in a letter posted on X. A year ago, Trump himself used X when he skipped the first GOP presidential primary debate and sought to undercut his Republican opponents by appearing in a prerecorded interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, which aired on X.

X, then Twitter, “ permanently suspended” Trump’s account in 2021 after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the election.

“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter announced in a tweet.

A month after buying the platform in 2022, Musk asked the public whether the former president’s social media account should be reinstated. Fifteen million people voted, and 51.8% were in favor or letting Trump return.

“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote, using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.” “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

Until Monday, Trump had posted only once on X since his page was reinstated. Last August, Trump posted a photo of his mug shot after he surrendered to authorities in Georgia on charges he conspired to overturn his the 2020 election. “Election interference,” the caption read. “Never Surrender!”

But he told Fox News he preferred to comment on Truth Social.

“I am not going on Twitter. I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News in April 2022. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”

Trump posted more frequently Monday on Truth Social than Twitter, sharing a stream of Breitbart stories, a New York Post front page, and personal rants characterizing Harris as a fraud who flip-flopped on policy.

But he has only 7.5 million followers on Truth Social. It’s not clear how loyal he will remain to the platform as his margins shrink in critical battleground states Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

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