In this photo illustration, businessman and Twitter owner Elon Musk tweets about a Twitter Spaces event he will be hosting 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 a Twitter Spaces event he will be hosting with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on May 24, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
It was supposed to be a historic moment for Twitter: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would smoothly kick off his presidential candidacy on the social media platform.
An uninterrupted conversation between DeSantis and Twitter CEO Elon Musk would be live-streamed on Twitter Spaces to mark the event.
But instead, the live audio event was beset with technical malfunctions. After some 20 minutes of crashing and echoing and chaos, it abruptly ended.
Many on Twitter had a one-word description for it: “disaster.”
The start of broadcast was delayed for a few minutes and then it cut out twice. Tech investor David Sacks, who was supposed to introduce the event, could be heard saying: “The servers are melting.”
At another point, as Sacks attempted to speak, an echo reverberated his words back to him. “It just keeps crashing, huh?” an unidentified speaker was heard saying, as Musk and his team scrambled to fix the problem.
A few minutes later, Musk promoted a new Spaces that seemed to be working, but much of the audience did not seem to make the leap. The first Spaces appeared to have more than 500,000 attendees at its peak, while the second seemed to hover around 150,000.
During the discussion, Sacks claimed the audience on the Spaces was one of the platform’s largest, but Earnest Wilkins, a former Twitter employee who helped produced Spaces, said: “Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product.”
Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product.
Example: @jacobbmc2 did 2x this for #singyourdialect, this one don’t even have Declan Rice rapping!
xoxo, a person who helped produce 3 of the 10 biggest Spaces in Twitter history https://t.co/midnkHHVx0
— Ernest Wilkins | 🏁 (@ErnestWilkins) May 24, 2023
The platform’s high-profile malfunctioning was not 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 staff has been whittled down to just about 10% of what it was before Musk’s acquisition, following mass layoffs and hundreds of others quitting. Outages have become far more common.
“This product always suffered from stability issues,” a former Twitter executive told NPR of Spaces. “But there were trained engineers standing by who could fix,” this person said. “Insane he thought he could do this after wiping out that whole team.”
One user on Twitter competitor Bluesky put it this way: “even though u knew it would turn out this way it is still amazing it turned out this way lol”
This story originally appeared on NPR
