Twitter spaces that were to host the 2024 presidential campaign announcement for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis crashed and were delayed for nearly half an hour as they left thousands confused with the technical glitch .
This led to immediate mockery on social media and confusion over whether the event had started.
Visitors wondered what was going on as Twitter techs raced to fix the problem and launch the ad.
Musk blamed his followers, others blamed the services, while some blamed Twitter’s massive loss of staff since Musk took over the social media giant.
In the end, thousands of people were left in the dark – and in silence – waiting for the revolutionary announcement.
Ron DeSantis presidential campaign announcement delayed nearly half an hour due to technical difficulties with Twitter spaces
The spaces were originally hosted from Elon Musk’s account, which has some 140 million subscribers, but eventually had to be relaunched from David Sacks’ account, which has less than 1 million subscribers.
More than half a million Twitter users joined the Spaces event on Wednesday night, which was delayed by 26 minutes and suffered several false starts.
When the product started working well, there were only around 250,000 users left to listen to.
Audio moments from the live event allowed users to hear host and platform owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks try to explain the crash.
“We’ve got so many people here that we’re melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Musk said at another point.
The spaces were originally hosted from Elon Musk’s account, which has 140 million subscribers, but eventually had to be relaunched with Sacks’ account, which has less than 1 million subscribers.
“I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room by an account with over 100 million subscribers, which is Elon’s account, I think it just creates a unprecedented level of scalability,” Sacks said.
“I think you broke the internet,” Sacks told DeSantis when relaunching the event. “You know you’re innovating when there are bugs and scaling issues,” he continued, trying to put a positive spin on the debacle.
After taking over Twitter late last year, Musk reduced the company’s server capacity in a bid to cut costs.
DeSantis officially entered the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Wednesday night with a Twitter Spaces chat that malfunctioned for about half an hour before the announcement was made official.
Trump will now face DeSantis for the 2024 Republican nomination as the two are the first to face Joe Biden
Since Musk took control of the company late last year, Twitter has faced a number of technical issues and outages. The problems may be partly due to Musk’s decision to lay off large numbers of technical and other staff.
Musk also cut Twitter’s server capacity in a bid to cut costs for the company which he said was bleeding money.
Over the past 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 about seeing old tweets popping up over and over again on their timeline.
According to a CNN report, the Twitter Spaces product was described by a former Twitter employee as “prototype” and “janky”.
“It’s a beta test that never ended,” the former employee said.
POLICY noted that previous Twitter Spaces events hosted by Musk, with smaller audiences, had also been shut down due to technical issues.
Since taking office, Musk has reduced Twitter’s server capacity in a bid to cut costs for the company which he said was bleeding money.
Despite the early problems, the announcement and ensuing discussion lasted nearly an hour, after which Sacks again acknowledged the rocky start, saying, “That’s not how you started, it’s that’s how you finish and we finished strong.”
By then, memes and rivals had already weighed in on the delays. A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, who is also a candidate for the Republican nomination, described it as “Glitchy. Technical issues. Uncomfortable silences. Complete launch failure. And that’s just the candidate!
President Joe Biden took to his Twitter account to say, “This link works” as he used it to raise funds for his 2024 campaign.
While speaking to Fox News after the Twitter troubles, DeSantis tried to put a positive spin on the announcement that went wrong.
