Elon Musk’s live conversation with former president Donald J. Trump on X got off to a glitchy start on Monday, a setback for the social media service as Mr. Musk pushes the company to regain its dominance as an online epicenter of political discourse.
Some users who tried to listen to the conversation, which was hosted on the company’s audio livestreaming feature called Spaces, were greeted by silence and an error message that read: “Details not available.” Users said they had trouble accessing the livestream on desktop computers and mobile phones. Those who were able to get the livestream to work were met with hold music.
The Spaces event was originally scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern. The number of attendees fluctuated wildly as users struggled to gain access, drifting between 100,000 and more than 700,000 listeners.
Mr. Musk blamed a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, for the glitches. DDoS attacks work by flooding servers with malicious traffic and knocking them offline.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he wrote. The attack could not immediately be verified.
Mr. Musk claimed the system had been tested “with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier that day.
He had spent Sunday evening testing the service to make sure it could stay up and running by streaming himself playing a video game.