DeSantis's presidential campaign: What went wrong during Musk's Twitter Spaces
What's the story
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's 2024 presidential campaign started on a sour note. All thanks to Twitter Spaces. The Republican was set to announce his presidential bid alongside Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks on Twitter. However, what followed was unexpected. The highly-anticipated campaign launch was marred by multiple crashes, screeching audio feedback, and technical difficulties.
Beginning
The event was mired in issues from the beginning
It is not every day that you see a presidential campaign being launched on Twitter Spaces. Therefore, DeSantis's event attracted many people. The event was hosted by Musk, the most prominent account on Twitter. But there were issues from the beginning of the event. When Sacks, the moderator, started speaking, loud and echoing feedback sounds disrupted the Space. Interestingly, they went silent quickly too.
Musk
Musk attributed the issues to overloaded servers
DeSantis and Sacks kept popping in and out of the event before finally exiting. Neither of them could say much. But Musk was able to speak. It is unclear what went wrong but the Twitter boss and Sacks attributed the failed event to overloaded servers. Although the event lasted for only a few minutes, over 600,000 people tuned in.
Overload
The event witnessed an unprecedented scalability level: Sacks
"Man, I think we melted the internet there," Sacks said in a separate Space. He said half a million people in the room and Musk's over 140 million followers might have created a "scalability level that was unprecedented." Sacks later claimed on Twitter that the event was "by far the biggest room ever held on social media."
Spaces
Spaces wasn't built to host such large-scale events
Sacks and Musk might be on to something with the 'overloaded servers' argument. After all, Twitter Spaces was not built to accommodate over 600,000 listeners at a time. A former Twitter employee told CNN that Spaces is a "beta that never ended." "Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product," they said. They added it can't handle high traffic.
Second event
DeSantis launched his campaign in a room hosted by Sacks
After the Musk-hosted event failed, they created another room hosted by Sacks. In the second event, DeSantis read his speech and launched his campaign. "I had to switch over to David hosting it because my account was breaking the system," Musk said. Sacks acknowledged the earlier glitches again. "It's not how you started, it's how you finish, and we finished strong," he said.
Twitter Post
Donald Trump mocked his Republican rival's failed campaign launch
Trump just posted this video making fun of DeSantis. I have to admit, I couldn't stop laughing😂
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 25, 2023
Trump spaces soon? pic.twitter.com/xDsWMTUBI3