The Twitter Spaces meant to host the 2024 presidential campaign announcement for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed by nearly half an hour following a major technical glitch.
It led to immediate mocking on social media and confusion about if the event had started.
Thousands of users were left wondering what was happening as Twitter techs scrambled to remedy the issue and get the announcement underway.
Musk blamed his followers, others blamed the servers, while some blamed the massive loss of Twitter staff since Musk took control of the social-media giant.
In the end, thousands of people were left in the dark – and in silence – waiting for the groundbreaking announcement.
Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement was delayed by close to half an hour due to technical difficulties pertaining to Twitter Spaces
The spaces had initially been hosted from Elon Musk’s account, which boasts some 140million followers, but ultimately had to be relaunched from David Sacks’ account, which has under 1million followers
More than half-a-million Twitter users joined the Spaces event Wednesday evening, which was delayed 26 minutes and had several false starts.
When the product began to function correctly, only about 250,000 users remained to listen.
Moments of sound from the livestream event allowed users to hear the host and owner of the platform Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks try to explain the crash.
‘We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,’ Sacks said at one point.
‘Nothing like this has ever happened before,’ said Musk in another moment.
The spaces had initially been hosted from Elon Musk’s account, which boasts 140million followers, but ultimately had to be relaunched with Sacks’ account, which has under 1million followers.
‘I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented,’ said Sacks.
‘I think you broke the internet,’ Sacks said to DeSantis when the event was relaunched. ‘You know you’re breaking new ground when there’s bugs and scaling issues,’ he continued, attempting to place a positive spin on the debacle.
After assuming ownership of Twitter late last year, Musk reduced the company’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs
DeSantis officially entered the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Wednesday night with a Twitter Spaces discussion that malfunctioned for about a half-hour before the announcement could be made official
Trump will now face DeSantis for the 2024 Republican nomination as the two are the front-runners to face Joe Biden
Since Musk assumed control of the company late last year, Twitter has faced a number of technical issues and outages. The issues may be partially owed to Musk’s decision to lay off large numbers of technical and other staff.
Musk also reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs at the company he said was bleeding money.
Over the last few months, Twitter has faced multiple service outages that have impacted its user base, including the ability to access the site and view images.
Some users have also reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool. Others have complained of seeing old tweets show up over and over again on their timelines.
According to a CNN report, the Twitter Spaces product was described by a former Twitter employee as a ‘prototype’ and ‘janky.’
‘It’s a beta test that never ended,’ said the former employee.
POLITICO noted that previous Twitter Spaces events hosted by Musk, with smaller audiences, had shut down as well due to technical glitches.
Since taking over, Musk has reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs at the company he said was bleeding money.
Despite the issues at the start, the announcement and subsequent discussion ran for nearly an hour, after which Sacks acknowledged the rough start again, saying: ‘It’s not how you started, it’s how you finish and we finished strong.’
By that time, memes and rivals had already weighed in on the delays. A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, who is also running for the Republican nomination, described it as “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!”
President Joe Biden took to his Twitter account to say, ‘This link works’ as he directed users to his 2024 fundraising campaign website.
As he spoke to Fox News after the Twitter issues, DeSantis tried to put a positive spin on the announcement that went wrong.
