The Twitter Spaces, which was scheduled to host the 2024 presidential campaign announcement for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, crashed and was delayed by nearly half an hour as thousands were confused by the tech glitch.
This immediately sparked mockery on social media and confusion over whether the event had even started.
Visitors wondered what happened as Twitter engineers struggled to fix the issue and get the announcement going.
Musk blamed his followers, others blamed the servers, while some blamed the massive loss of Twitter employees since Musk took control of the social media giant.
In the end, thousands of people sat in the dark – and in silence – awaiting the groundbreaking announcement.
Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign announcement was delayed by nearly half an hour due to technical difficulties related to Twitter Spaces
The Spaces were originally hosted through Elon Musk’s account, who has around 140 million followers, but ultimately had to be relaunched through David Sacks’ account, which has under 1 million followers
More than half a million Twitter users attended the Spaces event on Wednesday night, which was delayed by 26 minutes and had multiple false starts.
When the product started working properly, only about 250,000 users remained to listen.
Through audio moments from the livestream event, users could hear moderator and platform owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks trying to explain the crash.
“We have so many people here, we’re kind of melting the servers,” Sacks once said.
“Nothing like this has ever happened,” Musk said in another moment.
The Spaces were originally hosted on Elon Musk’s account, which has 140 million followers, but eventually had to be relaunched with Sacks’ account, which has less than 1 million followers.
“I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room with an account that has over 100 million followers, so Elon’s account, I think it just creates an unprecedented level of scalability,” Sacks said.
“I think you broke the internet,” Sacks told DeSantis when the event restarted. “You know you’re breaking new ground when there are bugs and scaling issues,” he continued, trying to put a positive spin on the debacle.
After Musk became the owner of Twitter late last year, he reduced the company’s server capacity to cut costs
DeSantis officially entered the 2024 Republican presidential primary on Wednesday night with a Twitter Spaces discussion that went dead for about a half hour before the announcement could be made official
Trump now faces DeSantis for the 2024 Republican nomination as the two are frontrunners in the fight against Joe Biden
Since Musk took control of the company late last year, Twitter has faced a series of technical issues and outages. The problems could be partly due to Musk’s decision to lay off a large number of technical and other employees.
Musk also reduced Twitter’s server capacity to cut costs at the company, which he said is bleeding money.
In recent months, Twitter has experienced several 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 that old tweets keep popping up in their timelines.
according to a cnn report, The Twitter Spaces product was described as “prototype” and “freaky” by a former Twitter employee.
“It’s a beta test that never ended,” said the former employee.
POLITICALLY noted that previous smaller-audience Twitter Spaces events hosted by Musk were also shut down due to technical glitches.
Since his acquisition, Musk has reduced Twitter’s server capacity to cut costs at the company, which he said is bleeding money.
Despite the initial issues, the announcement and ensuing discussion lasted almost an hour, after which Sacks again acknowledged the rough start, saying: “It’s not how you started, it’s how you finish and we’re going strong Target reached.”
By this point, memes and competitors had already contributed to the delays. A spokesman for former President Donald Trump, who is also running for the Republican nomination, described it as “flawed”. Technical problems. Uncomfortable silence. A complete failure at launch. 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.
Speaking to Fox News after the Twitter woes, DeSantis tried to take the failed announcement in a positive light.
