In this photo illustration, businessman and Twitter owner Elon Musk tweets about the Twitter Space event he will host with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on May 24, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.
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In this photo illustration, businessman and Twitter owner Elon Musk tweets about the Twitter Space event he will host with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on May 24, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
It was supposed to be a landmark moment for Twitter: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will launch his presidential campaign on a social media platform.
To mark the event, a conversation between DeSantis and Twitter CEO Elon Musk will be streamed live on Twitter Spaces.
But instead, the live audio event won’t start. After 21 minutes of crashing and buzzing and chaos, it came to an abrupt end.
several But Twitter There was a one word description for it: “disaster.”
The start of the broadcast was delayed for a few minutes and then cut twice. Tech investor David Sachs, who was supposed to open the event, could be heard saying: “The servers are melting.”
At another point, as Sachs attempted to speak, an echo relayed his words back to him. “It just keeps crashing, huh?” An unidentified speaker was heard saying as Musk and his team struggled to fix the problem.
A few minutes later, Musk touted a new spot, which seemed to work, but most of the audience didn’t jump in. The first space seems to have had over 500,000 attendees at its peak, while the second space had around 150,000 attendees.
During the discussion, Sachs claimed that Spaces’ audience was one of the platform’s largest audiences, but Ernest Wilkins, a former Twitter employee who helped create Spaces, said: “Lol it’s not in the top 150 by size in history.” is. Product.”
The platform’s high-profile malfunction wasn’t exactly surprising to those who have been observing the social media site since Musk took it over.
Since acquiring Twitter in October, the company is a shell of its former self.
Its workforce had been reduced to about 10% prior to Musk’s acquisition, after massive layoffs and hundreds of others leaving.
“This product was always plagued with stability issues,” a former Twitter executive told NPR. “But there were trained engineers standing by who could fix that,” said this person. “Mad he thought he could do this after wiping out the entire team.”
A user on Twitter competitor BlueSky put it this way: “Even though you knew it would turn out like this, it’s still amazing it turned out like this”.