May 26, 2023
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential hopeful, encountered unanticipated difficulties on Twitter Spaces while officially declaring his campaign open on the platform.
The Space began to experience difficulties when Twitter experienced a large technical malfunction, causing his announcement to be delayed. According to The Washington Post, the malfunction lasted about 30 minutes, causing more than half of DeSantis’ intended audience of 600,000 to exit the audio conference, including the governor himself. According to NBC News, just 161,000 people were able to hear DeSantis’ address in the end.
Although DeSantis’ campaign claimed that the event had “broken the Internet” because of its massive popularity, The Guardian noted that the problems were restricted to the Twitter app and did not effect the whole Internet. Elon Musk had to establish a fresh Spaces session to fix the technical issues, reallocating server resources to accommodate the sudden rise in demand.
According to The Guardian, Twitter Spaces resumed regular performance after the audience size was reduced, showing that the site struggled to accommodate the large number of users. However, a former Twitter employee who spoke to CNN anonymously said that Twitter Spaces was created as a prototype and was never completely turned into a solid product.
The sources for this piece include an article in ArsTechnica.
