It was an unprecedented move. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk rather than going through the left-wing media gatekeepers. It was a good idea in theory, but Twitter’s tech team apparently didn’t anticipate the enormous interest in the announcement. A minute into the Twitter Space, it was clear that the social media platform was experiencing technical problems. Users got a message saying, “Details not available.” The Space started, and then quickly stopped again. Eventually, moderator David Sacks came on and said, “There’s 380,000 people… I think we’ve got just a massive number of people online, so its servers are straining someone.”
At one point, there were nearly 700,000 users in the Space. “We’re just reallocating more server capability to be able to handle the load here. It’s really going crazy,” Sacks said.
Meanwhile, Downdetector reported that there were problems with the servers.
Holy crap! @RonDeSantis's announcement is crashing Twitter's servers. Currently 656k listeners. The mod on the @TwitterSpaces said, "We're just reallocating more server capability to be able to handle load here. It's really going crazy." pic.twitter.com/Z16J1u14Gj
— Paula Bolyard (@pbolyard) May 24, 2023
Later in the Space, Sacks said, “So this is, I think, totally unprecedented in terms of the numbers of people we have participating. By the way, I think Twitter is working much better now. I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account. I think that great scalability level was unprecedented, but with my meager followership, seems to be working much better.”
Musk added, “Yes, you know, you’re breaking new ground when there are bugs and scaling issues.”
Eventually, the Space came back online, and DeSantis was able to make his announcement. At publishing time, he was chatting with Musk about cancel culture. Once the glitches were worked out, the Twitter Space turned out to be a great place to announce a presidential campaign. After DeSantis made his canned announcement, he stayed around to chat with Musk and Sacks. It was part traditional Q&A and part three guys shooting the breeze. Nearly an hour in, there are nearly 300,000 people still tuned in.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this innovative platform, but so far, I really like what I see. DeSantis came across as very knowledgeable, articulate, and likable. I hope he and the other candidates do more of these going forward!
PJM’s Chris Queen will have a breakdown of the announcement coming soon.
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