Ron DeSantis’s Presidential Bid Launch On Twitter Spaces Was A Mess

On Wednesday the 24th of May, Ron DeSantis was scheduled to launch his presidential campaign in a live audio session (Twitter Spaces) on Elon Musk’s platform. The event would be attended by Elon Musk himself. However, once it started, the event quickly became a shambles marred by technical glitches.

As a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, Elon Musk in his tenure as the Twitter owner has pushed to diversify the platform. Seeking to turn it into a platform where any and everyone has a voice.

The ever-controversial billionaire proceeded to invite Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida to formally announce his run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Twitter Spaces. Twitter Spaces is a niche dedicated audio streaming feature on Twitter.

At the time, anyone would have considered this an easy win for Musk and Twitter as he was set to attract ‘rightwing blowhards and steal a march on Fox News’ as The Guardian put it. However, he was not ready to say the least for what came next.

The live stream was set to begin at 6:00 pm ET. As the live stream began and more and more people joined, the issues began to show. The audio, for the first 20 minutes was chaos reincarnate as it was affected by outages, feedback, garbled audio, and the stream collapsing and logging out users.

Listeners began reporting their Twitter apps crashing or logging them out as they tried to join the event. As expected soon enough, people on Twitter began to mock what should have been a choreographed event as a fumble by the Platform.

The hashtag #Desaster gained some traction as a result. Even President Biden’s official account joined in on the action posting a tweet with a donation link with the words, “This link works.”

David Sacks, the host, and moderator of the event, chose to see the silver lining of the situation unlike most who were in attendance. “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” he said.

After about 20 minutes of chaos and start-stop audio, the stream cut completely before restarting. “That was insane, sorry,” Mr. Musk said as the stream restarted and finally DeSantis was able to make his announcement.

The Event Highlighted The Many Issues With Twitter

Since taking over the platform in October 2022, Musk has been in the hot seat, making controversial decisions at every turn. One of these decisions is cutting the Twitter workforce by about 80% to reduce the company’s expenditure.

In his defense, expenditure did reduce from $4.5bn (£3.6bn) to $1.5bn but the cost has been evident from the start. As he had fired engineers, the platform’s efficiency and quality quickly went downhill.

Twitter outages became more rampant, error messages when posting videos or images, and issues when playing videos are just a few of many problems that have plagued the platform under Musk. The chaos that was Twitter Space during DeSantis’s launch was just the tip of the iceberg.

After cutting costs, Elon Musk also reduced server costs by shutting down some of Twitter’s data centers in Sacramento and California. As The Guardian reports, the number of people on the stream (about 600,000) was a contributing factor to the failure.

This all comes down to Twitter’s servers. “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.

After the stream cut and restarted, there were considerably fewer people (about 40,000 rising to 100,000) and the stream went on seamlessly. This further supports the claim that the demand exerted on the system was an issue.

A former Twitter employee, speaking to CNN, provided another reason for the shambolic event claiming Twitter Spaces is only a “prototype”. This would also explain a lot as it is quite demanding to exert that much demand on an unfinished product that wasn’t “intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic.”

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