In a much-awaited X chat that was postponed owing to technical difficulties, Donald Trump told Elon Musk that "illegal immigration saved my life".

Shortly after the planned start time of 8 p.m. Eastern Time (1 a.m. UK time), the website indicated that the page was "not available" for certain users, although over 115,000 people seemed to have joined successfully.

"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X," tweeted Musk after that. attempting to shut it down."

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is designed to force a website, computer, or online service offline.

This is done by flooding the target with many requests, consuming its capacity and rendering it unable to respond to legitimate requests.

The event started around 40 minutes late with Musk opening the chat talking about the assassination attempt on Trump.

Much laughter was audible from the tech millionaire in those portions, none more so than when Trump declared that "illegal immigration saved my life".

The Republican contender explained how, on July 13, at the gathering, he had turned to glance at an illegal immigration chart, which meant gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks had missed.

Trump continued by attacking Democratic opponent Kamala Harris's immigration record, alleging that after being placed "in charge" of the border between Mexico and the United States, Harris experienced a sharp increase in unauthorised crossings.