Twitter has experienced repeated crashes, during a live audio chat between CEO Elon Musk and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, disrupting the politician’s announcement of his Republican presidential nomination bid.
Since Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter in October after the $42 billion deal, the social media company has undergone significant layoffs, including a considerable number of engineers responsible for addressing software bugs.
Current and former Twitter employees had previously warned Reuters that these substantial layoffs would leave the platform vulnerable to crashing during periods of high traffic.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist and close friend of Elon Musk, acknowledged the server issues when attempting to initiate the event on Wednesday, stating, “We’ve got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.” Musk attributed the problems to the sheer number of listeners and his extensive Twitter following.
Approximately 678,000 individuals tuned in to listen to the conversation despite Twitter experiencing repeated crashes. Eventually, the Spaces session resumed with an audience of around 304,000 listeners. In a previous interview with the BBC on Twitter Spaces, Musk had garnered an audience of approximately 3 million listeners.
During the chat session, hashtags such as “Failure to Launch,” “Crashed,” and #DeSaster trended on Twitter in the United States, highlighting the platform’s technical difficulties.
Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter has experienced more frequent outages. In March, thousands of users reported difficulties accessing links posted on the platform. According to the internet observatory NetBlocks, this incident marked Twitter’s sixth major outage since the beginning of the year, compared to three during the same period the previous year.
Amidst the intermittent crashes on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden humorously referenced the rocky rollout of DeSantis’ presidential campaign by tweeting a fundraising appeal with the comment, “This link works.”
