Twitter reportedly had reservations about how Ron DeSantis’ campaign launch would handle traffic – but CEO Elon Musk continued to tout the glitch-filled occasion as a success.
The disastrous audio event took place on the social media site on Wednesday – but was marred by technical issues as moderators were unable to keep up with the amount of traffic the planned call demanded.
In addition to starting 30 minutes late, it included over 20 minutes of glitches, hot mic moments, and inaudible conversations before the live stream was finally cut.
Minutes later, the livestream restarted – but the damage to both the Florida governor and the outspoken Twitter boss was done. What was meant to be a crowning achievement for the two is now being labeled a “horrible” and a “fiasco”.
These criticisms, coming from mainstream media, were compounded by the mass of onlooker-induced memes lambasting the event – many of which were equally stark. Faced with this negative attention on Wednesday night, Musk – in trademark fashion – continued to tweet on Wednesday, touting the call as the “Top story on Earth”.
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Twitter reportedly had reservations about how Ron DeSantis’ campaign launch would handle traffic
The disastrous audio event took place on the social media site on Wednesday – but was marred by technical issues as moderators were unable to keep up with the amount of traffic the planned call demanded.
Despite the problems with the event – now labeled a ‘disaster’ and widely criticized online – CEO Elon Musk continued to gloat online
“The best story on Earth today,” the 51-year-old South African tycoon wrote at around 10 p.m., just hours after the event ended, about half an hour late.
As media around the world called the event a ‘disaster’, ’embarrassing’ and ‘awful’, Musk – who amid the mishaps profusely apologized to an estimated 700,000 onlookers – renamed the reply with a different buzzword.
“I call it ‘massive attention,'” he wrote – in a Tweet that has since been viewed over 2.3 million times.
The cool response, while widely seen, stands in stark contrast to the reaction offered by the relatively new real-time social media boss, who apparently saw him feel audible relief once the issues were resolved 40 minutes past the start time. expected – at which point DeSantis, 44, had yet to say a word.
“It was crazy, sorry,” Musk told thousands of onlookers, as well as a confused Desantis — as Twitter’s tech lead moderating the event praised the couple for, in his own words, ” melt the internet”.
That staff member, a known Musk confidant brought in from PayPal to help the big Tesla boss oversee his new online empire, is David Sacks, who on the call called the traffic the event was seeing “good sign”.
That characterization differed widely from comments given to The New York Times and CNN by at least three Twitter staffers believed to work under Sacks – who insinuated on Thursday that the Twitter Space technology for the call was not ready. for the public, especially given the scale of the event.
“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” a former staffer told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”
Current staff members who spoke to The Times added that their team had been concerned about whether the platform could handle the traffic the audio-only stream was expected to generate, and that there was also no plan for “site reliability issues”.
The ex-employee who spoke to CNN further added that Spaces — released earlier this month after a three-year beta rollout — relies on Twitter’s own infrastructure and Amazon Web Services, which “don’t are not intended to handle Twitter-wide traffic”. ‘
Those reported concerns proved vindicated Wednesday at 6 p.m. EST, when hundreds of thousands of users sat on their hands for the better part of an hour waiting to hear DeSantis speak — instead. of this they encountered drowned chatter and crashes, before the outright livestream. cut.
Initially delayed by just ten minutes, the audio incidents continued until 6:30 p.m., where the audio was still down and DeSantis had yet to speak.
The stream was able to be up and running about 10 minutes later — at which point Sacks offered his dubious congratulations to DeSantis for “breaking the internet.”
Musk, meanwhile, called the sequel series of flubs refreshing, telling moderators and those silently watching that it was nice to trade “canned speeches and teleprompters” for something more organic.
“It’s real,” Musk said at the time.
The internet, however, was not so understanding and almost immediately burst into mockery with a relentless onslaught of memes – some of which ruthlessly compared the campaign’s launch failures to Musk’s failed rocket launch from SpaceX last month.
Social media users didn’t hold back when they blasted the planned event’s technical shortcomings – delivering a relentless onslaught of memes, some of which compared the disaster to Musk’s failed SpaceX rocket launch last month
Current staff members who spoke to The Times added that their team had been concerned about whether the platform could handle the traffic the audio-only stream was expected to generate, and that there was also no plan for “site reliability issues”.
The widely seen fiasco comes as Musk was criticized for the 75% layoff made soon after by the Silicon Valley company for $44 billion, cutting entire departments and teams in the process.
Meanwhile, staffers still working under Musk have expressed reservations about Musk’s relatively recent turn to politics, touting offers for the likes of outspoken anti-Semite Kanye West and now DeSantis — who, in some regions of the United States, is equally polarizing.
“Biggest campaign launch failure in history,” tweeted another.
“Nice DeSantis. Presented by Elon L Musk.’
One person tweeted a meme of an engineer staring at a server, captioned: “Elon right now.”
Another shared a photo of one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploding – playing with the title of the event: ‘Presidential Launch’.
He captioned the photo: “Ron DeSantis learns what happens when you start things with Elon Musk.”
Others commented on how amazing it was that the demand hadn’t been anticipated and that the extra server bandwidth hadn’t been secured.
“He has issues,” said one.
“DeSantis 2024: Technical issues,” another joked.
Another speculated: ‘Welp maybe Elon was planning to ruin the Desantis deployment.’
Both Musk and Sacks maintained that the issue was just a matter of server bandwidth and was resolved simply by hosting the event from Sacks’ account rather than Musk’s.
That said, the widely seen fiasco comes as Musk came under fire for the 75% layoff made soon after by the Silicon Valley company for $44 billion, cutting entire departments and teams in the process.
Meanwhile, staffers still working under Musk have expressed reservations about Musk’s relatively recent turn to politics, touting offers for the likes of the outspoken anti-Semite Kanye West and now DeSantis – who in some areas of the United States is equally polarizing.
These comments were also made to The Times, with employees expressing a desire for Twitter to remain a politically neutral platform.
Despite the unfortunate campaign call, Musk still officially endorsed DeSantis.
