Twitter crash mars Ron DeSantis US presidential bid announcement
1 min read 25 May 2023, 07:25 AM ISTThe announcement of Ron DeSantis' US presidential run on Twitter, was marred by multiple crashes on Wednesday. His live conversation with Elon Musk faced issues due to Twitter crash
PremiumThe impact of layoffs on Twitter was visible when the micro-blogging site crashed multiple times during Elon Musk's live conversation with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday. Twitter glitch hampered Ron DeSantis' announcement of running for the Republican presidential nomination.
After the Twitter takeover in October, Elon Musk fired thousands of employees including engineers who were responsible for fixing software bugs. The steep layoffs can cost the microblogging site of facing tech issues frequently. Mass layoffs would put the platform at risk of crashing during times of high traffic, former and current Twitter employees told Reuters.
"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.
However, Twitter owner, Elon Musk attributed the problem to the number of listeners and his large Twitter following. It is worth noting that about 678,000 people tuned in to listen as Twitter suffered repeated crashes.
The Spaces session was later resumed, taking the listener count to around 304,000. About 3 million people listened to Musk's interview with the BBC on Twitter Spaces last month.
"Failure to Launch", "Crashed" and #DeSaster were among the trending Twitter topics in the U.S. during the chat session.
Frequent Twitter outages post Twitter takeover by Elon Musk
There are frequent episodes of Twitter outages under Musk's leadership. In March this year, several Twitter users reported problems accessing links posted on the platform. The March incident was Twitter's sixth major outage of 2023, compared with three in the same period last year, said the Internet observatory.
Amid the Twitter crash on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden poked fun at the shaky rollout of DeSantis' presidential bid by tweeting out a fundraising appeal: "This link works."
(With inputs from Reuters)
