During a highly anticipated live audio chat on Wednesday, Twitter experienced multiple crashes, hindering Florida Governor Ron DeSantis from making his announcement about running for the Republican presidential nomination. The chat involved Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, and attracted significant attention. Since Musk assumed control of the social media platform in October, a substantial number of employees, including engineers responsible for software bug fixes, have been laid off. Current and former Twitter employees had previously warned that these layoffs would increase the platform's vulnerability to crashing during periods of high traffic.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk, acknowledged the server overload issue when he attempted 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 technical problems to the overwhelming number of listeners and his extensive Twitter following. Despite the crashes, approximately 678,000 individuals tuned in to the audio chat on Twitter Spaces. Eventually, the Spaces session resumed, with approximately 304,000 listeners participating. Last month, around 3 million people listened to Musk's interview with the BBC on Twitter Spaces.
The disruptions caused by the crashes led to several trending Twitter topics, including "Failure to Launch," "Crashed," and #DeSaster, during the chat session, reflecting the frustration of users.
Musk, in his signature eccentric style, tweeted, "All Presidential candidates are most welcome on this platform."
Under Musk's ownership, Twitter has experienced a higher frequency of outages. In March, numerous users encountered difficulties accessing links shared on the platform. Internet observatory NetBlocks reported that this incident marked Twitter's sixth major outage since the beginning of the year, compared to three incidents during the same period last year.
Amidst the intermittent crashes on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden took a lighthearted approach and tweeted a fundraising appeal that humorously referenced the shaky rollout of DeSantis' presidential bid, stating, "This link works."