Twitter glitches mar DeSantis debut as presidential candidate

In this photo illustration, businessman and Twitter owner Elon Musk tweets about a Twitter Spaces event he will be hosting with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on May 24, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

It was supposed to be a historic moment for Twitter: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would smoothly kick off his presidential candidacy on the social media platform.

An uninterrupted conversation between DeSantis and Twitter CEO Elon Musk would be live-streamed on Twitter Spaces to mark the event.

But instead, the live audio event was beset with technical malfunctions. After some 20 minutes of crashing and echoing and chaos, it abruptly ended.

Many on Twitter had a one-word description for it: “disaster.”

The start of broadcast was delayed for a few minutes and then it cut out twice. Tech investor David Sacks, who was supposed to introduce the event, could be heard saying: “The servers are melting.”

At another point, as Sacks attempted to speak, an echo reverberated his words back to him. “It just keeps crashing, huh?” an unidentified speaker was heard saying, as Musk and his team scrambled to fix the problem.

A few minutes later, Musk promoted a new Spaces that seemed to be working, but much of the audience did not seem to make the leap. The first Spaces appeared to have more than 500,000 attendees at its peak, while the second seemed to hover around 150,000.

During the discussion, Sacks claimed the audience on the Spaces was one of the platform’s largest, but Earnest Wilkins, a former Twitter employee who helped produced Spaces, said: “Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product.”