Twitter failed several times on Wednesday during a highly anticipated live audio discussion between Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, delaying the politician’s announcement that he is competing for the Republican presidential nomination.
Since taking over the social networking platform in October, Musk has fired thousands of staff, including many engineers in charge of correcting software flaws.
According to current and former Twitter employees, the significant layoffs would put the platform at risk of failing during peak traffic periods.
“We’ve got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” said David Sacks, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk, while attempting to start the event on Wednesday.
Musk blamed the issues on the enormous number of listeners and his large Twitter following.
As Twitter crashed repeatedly, approximately 678,000 users tuned in to listen.
The Spaces session was eventually restarted, with approximately 304,000 listeners.
Last month, approximately 3 million people tuned in to Musk’s chat with the BBC on Twitter Spaces.
During the chat session, the trending Twitter topics in the United States included “Failure to Launch,” “Crashed,” and #DeSaster.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter outages have become increasingly frequent. Thousands of users experienced difficulties viewing links uploaded on the network in March.
According to NetBlocks, the March episode was Twitter’s sixth major outage since the start of the year, compared to three in the same period last year.
In between crashes on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden poked fun at the shaky rollout of DeSantis’ presidential bid by tweeting out a fundraising appeal: “This link works.”
