Ron DeSantis announced his presidential run yesterday, with Elon Musk at his side, using that technological marvel called Twitter. It did not go well.
Twitter’s livestream event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of users logged on to hear DeSantis announce his bid for the White House.
Sound from the livestream event — which was held on Twitter Spaces and hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks — cut in and out in the first minutes after starting.
“We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his election night party in Tampa, Florida, in November 2022.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces he’s running for president in 2024
More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis’ announcement by nearly half an hour. When the event was relaunched using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users ultimately listened in.Twitter has faced a variety of outages and technical issues since Musk took over the platform late last year. Shortly after acquiring the company, Musk laid off large numbers of technical and other staff and reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs.
Oh please oh please oh please. May the right wing continue to rely on Elon Musk on technical issues. It’s like a perfect model of how Republican policies work. Errm, don’t work, that is.