Outages, garbled audio: DeSantis’s 2024 launch
marred by Twitter tech meltdown
Struggling platform experienced its greatest stress
test yet on Wednesday, with glitches piling as more people joined the stream
Kari Paul
Thu 25 May
2023 02.25 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/24/ron-desantis-2024-twitter-launch-tech-outage
Ron
DeSantis’s presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces was hyped by Elon
Musk as “groundbreaking”, and extensively advertised as a new frontier for
“free speech” in politics. Instead, the results were a disaster.
The event,
which marked the first time a major candidate had announced their run for
president on social media, marked Twitter’s latest attempt to draw more users
and create profit as financial challenges mount. Since taking over the social
network, laying off upwards of 80% of staff, Musk’s company has experienced a
rise in technical glitches and errors.
That
struggling system experienced its greatest stress test yet with Wednesday’s
stream, which at 6.20pm ET had nearly 600,000 listeners tuned into Spaces,
Twitter’s dedicated audio streaming feature. By Musk’s own count, it was
gaining 50,000 more a minute. As the livestream began, the audio line
experienced feedback, outages and garbled audio. Many users reported their
Twitter apps crashing or logging them out as they tried to join the stream.
The
glitches piled on for an excruciating 20 minutes. David Sacks, the Republican
donor and friend of Elon Musk moderating the audio event, got a few sentences
in before the stream collapsed. He introduced Musk, and praised DeSantis for
keeping Florida open during Covid. Then the feed cut again. And again. And
again.
“We got so
many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good
sign,” said Sacks, followed by Musk stating in the background that he was
working to allocate more server capacity. The feed then cut once more and
participants received a notice: “This space has ended.”
Finally,
nearly 25 minutes after the intended start time, the livestream was underway –
with significantly fewer listeners than before, at approximately 40,000
(numbers later climbed back to over 100,000 but did not reach the original
listening figures). Musk acknowledged that the previous stream had “broken the
Twitter system” before Sacks awkwardly asked DeSantis if he had an announcement
to make.
“I am running
for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,”
DeSantis said, reiterating lines from his announcement video. “There is no
substitute for victory … we must look forward, not backwards.”
After
acknowledging the “technical difficulties”, Sacks asked DeSantis why he chose
to launch his candidacy on Twitter rather than TV, to which he responded by
praising Musk as a “free speech advocate”.
“What was
done with Twitter is really significant for the future of our country,” he
said.
Musk has
billed himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has at times aligned himself
with rightwing conspiracy theorists and hate speech. Upon taking over Twitter,
he reinstated the account of Donald Trump and others who had been banned from
the platform for violating policies. As the 2024 election cycle is underway,
Musk has attempted to position Twitter as a place “where all voices are heard”,
promising to host Republican and Democrat candidates at events like
Wednesday’s.
But the
spectacle of the DeSantis launch proved just how ambitious, and potentially
implausible, that goal remains, with the company facing ongoing concern of
physical collapse due to lack of staffing and infrastructural support,
including the closure of a number of data centers. Musk has already attempted
to spin the tech disaster as a win for the company, stating that there was so
much interest in the stream that it “broke the internet”.
Hobbling
through the livestream, Musk referenced his $44bn purchase of the platform:
“Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless.”
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