Ron DeSantis‘ planned Twitter announcement of his 2024 run for the White House did not go as planned this Wednesday.
People reported crashes and delays as sound from the event cut in and out during the first few minutes. “We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” tech entrepreneur David Sacks, who hosted the event along with Elon Musk said at one point.
According to CNN, more than half-a-million people logged on for the event, which was ended and restarted, and ended up delaying DeSantis’ launch by nearly a half-hour. When it was restarted using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users returned.
“I think you broke the internet there,” Sacks said when the event was relaunched.
I'm seeing this on desktop. Man… this is embarrassing. I feel bad for Elon. Trump won without even trying here… pic.twitter.com/NpwrO5MovB
— Nuance Bro (@NuanceBro) May 24, 2023
“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,” Sacks added.
“You know you’re breaking new ground when there’s bugs and scaling issues,” Sacks said, trying to add a positive spin to the screwup.
Speaking to CNN, a former Twitter employee said the “Spaces” feature on the platform was not designed to handle so much activity.
“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the former employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”
