The launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign on Twitter was marred by technical glitches on Wednesday evening.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, has sought to diversify Twitter’s audience, describing himself as a “free speech absolutist” while also reinstating previously banned accounts such as Donald Trump’s. However, he has also cut costs severely, leading to warnings that the platform could become prone to outages more regularly.
Here we answer questions about what happened to the DeSantis launch and why.
How was the DeSantis launch affected?
The Florida governor chose to launch his presidential campaign in Twitter Spaces, a live audio streaming platform that that counts Musk among its fans. However, the DeSantis event appeared to buckle under the weight of demand. By 6.20pm ET it had nearly 600,000 listeners and according to Musk was gaining 50,000 a minute.
As the live stream began, the audio feed was affected by feedback, outages and garbled audio. Listeners reported their Twitter apps crashing or logging them out as they tried to join the event. After 20 minutes of audio chaos, the stream cut out before restarting. DeSantis was able to declare his bid 25 minutes after the event had been due to start.
What caused the glitches on Spaces?
According to the participants, the platform seemed to have been overwhelmed by the number of listeners. David Sacks, a Republican donor and friend of Elon Musk who moderated the audio event, said the servers hosting the event could not cope. “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” he said.
Sacks added: “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented.”
The event restarted and was able to run more smoothly with considerably fewer listeners at 40,000 people, indicating that demand was an issue. Numbers later climbed back to more than 100,000.
Was the issue cost cuts?
Since taking over Twitter in October, Musk has cut costs at Twitter severely and says expenditure at the company has fallen from $4.5bn (£3.6bn) to $1.5bn amid warnings from its new owner that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. This includes cutting server costs by shutting down a data centre in Sacramento, California, one of its three data centres in the US (although Twitter also rents cloud server capacity from Amazon and Google).
The company has also let go more than three-quarters of its 7,500 staff, including engineers. Against this backdrop, glitches have been hitting the platform regularly, including users finding themselves blocked from posting after being told, erroneously, that they had reached their daily limit.
Were the problems specific to Spaces?
A former Twitter employee told CNN that Spaces was a “prototype” and a “janky” tool. “Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the former employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.” The person, quoted anonymously, said Spaces relied on a combination of Twitter’s technical infrastructure and Amazon servers, describing the setup as “things that aren’t intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic”.
The former employee also told CNN that Spaces was built on infrastructure from Periscope, a video streaming platform bought by Twitter in 2015, and had not been integrated with Twitter properly.
Are Twitter’s problems all down to Musk?
It is probably worth a glance at a whistleblowing complaint by Twitter’s former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, in which he outlines a litany of data and information security failings at the company. He said Twitter was at risk of a data centre failure that would pose a “catastrophic and existential risk for Twitter’s survival”. Whether or not Musk’s cost cuts have exacerbated dealing with these problems, it is clear Twitter had issues before the Tesla CEO came along.
However, dealing with problems such as the DeSantis launch glitches will still be Musk’s responsibility, according to the man himself. Announcing the appointment of Linda Yaccarino as the new Twitter chief executive this month, Musk said he would retain a hands-on role as executive chair and chief technology officer. Yaccarino tweeted on Thursday that the DeSantis launch was “historical” – but there will need to be a postmortem to ensure that similar events are not hit by more glitches.
Tonight’s reflection — we just heard a rare and unscripted conversation, on a range of important topics, with a Presidential candidate — all launched on Twitter. That’s historical. Let’s do more. Freedom of speech is priceless. @elonmusk, @DavidSacks, @RonDeSantis
— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayacc) May 25, 2023
