DeSantis/Musk event didn’t break the Internet, but it did break Twitter

Yesterday, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis became the first presidential hopeful to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces, which Elon Musk had touted as a "smart move" for "any candidate" to "get the highest possible audience." But instead of making sure that DeSantis' announcement was delivered to the broadest possible audience, Twitter glitched for nearly 30 minutes, causing more than half of DeSantis' initial 600,000-strong audience to ditch the audio session, briefly including DeSantis himself, The Washington Post reported. In the end, only 161,000 users heard DeSantis deliver his short speech, NBC News reported, with a total of approximately 300,000 users ultimately attending the audio-only event, which lasted more than an hour. A screenshot widely shared from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" showed that the number represented fewer viewers than videos of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got playing a game on Twitch, Buzzfeed got exploding a watermelon, and April the Giraffe got giving birth. While DeSantis' campaign claimed that the event was so popular it "broke the Internet," the reality is that the traffic surge only broke the app. To solve issues like Twitter Spaces crashing, distracting feedback, and audio cutting out or sounding garbled, The Guardian reported, Musk had to set up an entirely new Spaces session. He told users that Twitter was "reallocating some of the server capability to be able to handle the load here. It’s really going crazy.” Once there was a much smaller audience, Twitter Spaces functioned normally, which The Guardian reported indicated that the issue really was too much user demand for Twitter to handle. However, The Washington Post noted that Twitter Spaces has, in the past, handled much higher user demand, with Musk hosting an event in March where 1.2 million tuned in with seemingly no issues. Joining Musk in hosting the DeSantis announcement was venture capitalist David Sacks, whom CNN reported attempted to spin the glitches as a sign of Twitter's success. “You know you’re breaking new ground when there’s bugs and scaling issues,” Sacks said during the Spaces session, which he said was "melting the servers." But an anonymous former Twitter employee told CNN that it was really a sign that Twitter Spaces is still just a "janky" tool that isn't ready for prime time. “Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the ex-employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.” While Twitter Spaces was glitching, NBC News reported that voices could be heard fretting that DeSantis' rival Donald Trump would have a field day mocking the event, and that is indeed what happened. Trump is currently "significantly" ahead of DeSantis in Republican primary polls, MSNBC reported. A spokesperson for Trump's campaign, Steven Cheung, told NBC News that the event was a disaster, while Trump posted critically of DeSantis on Truth Social. "Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!" Cheung told NBC News, while Trump mocked DeSantis' collar for being "too big" and said DeSantis' campaign would be as big a disaster as the Twitter campaign launch. Musk responded by joking that the only reason people saw Trump's comments was because of screenshots shared on Twitter. Trump wasn't the only 2024 presidential candidate who took a jab at DeSantis for launching his campaign on a glitchy social media platform. Biden also got in on the fun by tweeting a link to his own campaign fundraising webpage, bragging, "This link works." Despite criticism, Musk is positioning DeSantis' announcement event as a success, claiming that Twitter signups went "ballistic" because of it. He also encouraged all presidential candidates to host Twitter Spaces events while diminishing the importance of media reports that called the event a failure. In a curious twist of circular logic, Musk seems to be bragging that because the glitches spurred media attention, it's a reason for candidates to announce on Twitter rather than on traditional media platforms, which he seemingly credited for critically raising awareness of the event. "I call it 'massive attention,'" Musk tweeted. "Top story on Earth today."

Twitter Spaces’ history of glitches

Twitter Spaces debuted in 2021, after which it underwent some redesigns, leading to August 2022, when TechCrunch reported that a key update would soon roll out. Reviews of Twitter Spaces positioned it as an appealing feature that bested rival audio tools like Clubhouse or Spotify Live. A few months later, Musk took over Twitter, and by early December, The Verge reported that he had laid off or purged "most of the Spaces team." That same month, Musk temporarily disabled Twitter Spaces after discovering what Musk called a "legacy bug" that allowed journalists whose Twitter accounts had been banned to still have access to Twitter Spaces. The bug was seemingly quickly fixed and Spaces returned the next day, but the extreme reaction of disabling the feature left many wondering what was going on with Spaces. The ex-Twitter Spaces employee who talked to CNN yesterday said that the tool was built on the live video streaming app Periscope's "existing infrastructure" after Twitter purchased it, claiming that the functionality was never properly integrated with Twitter. He said this was part of the reason why Twitter Spaces had so many glitches yesterday, in addition to Twitter Spaces being run across "multiple services" that "aren’t intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic.” Once Musk got DeSantis' Twitter Spaces event back up and running, Sacks tried to smooth over the technical difficulties by saying, "It’s not how you started, it’s how you finish, and we finished strong.” But it seems obvious that DeSantis losing half his initial audience was the main pitfall of so many Twitter Spaces glitches. DeSantis did not seem to promote the event on either his governor Twitter account or his personal Twitter account, instead only sharing his campaign video. At the end of the Twitter Spaces event, Musk thanked the audience and presumably his Twitter team "for working with us on this historic event.” During the event, Musk could be heard calling the glitches "unfortunate" and bemoaning, "We’ve never seen this before." The Washington Post reported that Musk has since walked back his seeming endorsement of DeSantis posted last July, saying during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit that he "would really just like someone fairly normal and sensible to be president." Musk has since made it clear that he wants to see all presidential candidates making key announcements on Twitter. “It is important for people to hear directly from candidates," Musk said during the Twitter Spaces event.