BREAKING: DeSantis Campaign Announcement Crashes Twitter
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 on 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
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.
PJM’s Chris Queen will have a breakdown of the announcement coming soon.