Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign announcement on Twitter Spaces was delayed by ~25 minutes of crashes, feedback glitches, and audio failures
even after Ron DeSantis' glitchy campaign kick off Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal : Twitter's Flaws Snag Elon Musk's Media Ambitions Steve Peoples / Associated Press : DeSantis set to make much-anticipated presidential campaign announcement, formalizing Trump rivalry Taylor Hatmaker / TechCrunch : Twitter technical issues crash Ron DeSantis's 2024 campaign announcement Semafor : Ron DeSantis gambled on Elon Musk and went bust Wired : Ron DeSantis Pushed Elon Musk's Twitter to Its Breaking Point LinkedIn: Allison Paine Landers : This is NOT a political post. When you drive customers to an experience, it simply has to work. — While I understand estimating traffic is tough … Jon Biedermann : Sooo... if you believe as I do, you want to make sure that your tech platform can respond to what I always call an “Oprah” moment. … Tweets: David Sacks / @davidsacks : @GovRonDeSantis announced he's running for president on Twitter. This was by far the biggest room ever held on social media. Twitter performed great after some initial scaling challenges. Thanks Twitter Team for adapting so quickly to make history! https://twitter.com/... Joe Biden / @joebiden : This link works: [Donate to reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris] Ben Collins / @oneunderscore__ : David Sacks just ludicrously made up that Ron DeSantis' Twitter space was the largest group that “has ever met online.” There are 100,000 people in this thing. @jason : I wonder if this is a DDOS attack Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez / @aoc : We had more people join when I played Among Us 👾 https://twitter.com/... Linda Yaccarino / @lindayacc : Tonight's reflection — we just heard a rare and unscripted conversation, on a range of important topics, with a Presidential candidate — all launched on Twitter. That's historical. Let's do more. Freedom of speech is priceless. @elonmusk, @DavidSacks, @RonDeSantis Alex Heath / @alexeheath : “probably the biggest room that has ever been assembled online,” says David Sacks of this new Twitter Space with Ron DeStantis and Elon Musk (first one didn't work and was canceled) i have been in bigger Clubhouse rooms https://twitter.com/... Ron DeSantis / @rondesantis : I'm running for president to lead our Great American Comeback. [video] Matt Binder / @mattbinder : i just want to point out that it appears Twitter has removed the *video view* count metric this number was consistently well below the “tweet view” metric (because not everyone who views a tweet in their feed actually plays the video) this is less transparency from Elon Musk https://twitter.com/... David Sacks / @davidsacks : Wow 6.5 million listeners and growing fast. Thanks to all the legacy media types and political hacks for flipping out that the Space started 15 minutes late. It was perfect once it got going, and now you're just making it bigger! https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : This is a dumb false claim, needs to be corrected by someone who actually understands media / math. He means it was clicked on 6.5mil times. When TV says something had 3.3mil viewers, it means its *per minute* average. Also twitter is nowhere on MRC audits of anything they say. https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Oh for the undeserved confidence of those men who can twist a flaccid performance into a triumph and for whom any attention is a positive even if glaringly negative. (See: Top story because massive fuckup.) https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : A 🧵: I like Linda a lot and think she has been a canny media exec and a strong ad gexecutive. Elon is lucky to have her. But this tweet feels all wrong, since if this obvious debacle — where the medium became the message in a spectacularly cloddish way — happened on NBC when she... https://twitter.com/... @severalnitrogen : On DeSantis' site theres a scrolling bar of names who have “just donated” However its just a scrolling list of the same names repeating [image] Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Twitter employees tell me that Musk's sharing of the DeSantis Twitter Space caused an overload as more than 600k people tried to listen. It crashed Twitter's iOS app and caused its website to glitch. Also teams did no advance prep for today's space. https://www.nytimes.com/... @rmac18 : *rain pours into my house because I've neglected to fix the roof* me: This must be a category 5 hurricane. [image] @acyn : Ingraham: What happened? Sacks: We had a million people simultaneously trying to get into a Twitter space.. and DeSantis just melted the servers. We had so much interest — I mean, I have to hand it to him, normally it takes a Kardashian to do that.. [video] Tom Gara / @tomgara : It's not the main point here, but still: it's kind of amazing how none of the live stream platforms have managed to get numbers even close to what TV still does every night, even with most having an install base / daily usage far far higher https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Disaster. He's killed the bird. Can't do quality. Can't do mass media. Doesn't have the data. Enjoy the silence, advertisers. @desantiswarroom : 10 million views. https://twitter.com/... A.R. Moxon / @juliusgoat : everyone: wow, he shit his pants elon: yes, but everybody saw it [image] Mehdi Hasan / @mehdirhasan : You can be the richest person in the world, and the person who wants to be the most powerful person in the world, and still make complete fools of yourselves online. It's amateur hour over at both Twitter HQ and the DeSantis campaign on their joint big night, it seems. Lol. Jon Favreau / @jonfavs : So Ron DeSantis chose a glitchy audio-only format with an audience 1/20th the size of a Fox primetime show to just....read his stump speech? Tommy Vietor / @tvietor08 : Gotta love these morons saying an audience of 500,000 people “broke the internet” like it's a 90s AOL chat room @steinkobbe : Tech genius [image] Alexander Nazaryan / @alexnazaryan : If only there were some kind of audio/visual medium already installed in every American household. Franklin Leonard / @franklinleonard : Who could have possibly foreseen that Ron DeSantis's big coming out party would be an absolute shambles because of infrastructure and arrogance? Oliver Willis / @owillis : Ron DeSantis learning what happens when you launch things with Elon Musk [image] Ben Jacobs / @bencjacobs : There's a lot of precedent for this. Henry Clay announced his 1844 campaign on an open telegraph line with Samuel Morse but a wire went down in a storm while Clay was tapping out his announcement @projectlincoln : Don't be fooled- Ron DeSantis didn't “break the internet” because he's popular. This happened because Elon Musk sucks at his job. Evan DeSimone / @smorgasboredom : It's actually pretty funny that we pretended Elon Musk was some kind of outré futurist when really he's the most common thing of all, an aging, portly, divorced, white guy who backs Republicans because his kids don't love him. Jon Lovett / @jonlovett : “Before you can be president, unmute yourself” Jon Lovett / @jonlovett : Ron DeSantis sitting somewhere in a swivel chair 10 out of 10 raging @boring_as_heck : cant believe a low quality audio stream on a website that barely works hosted by three of the most viscerally unappealing people in the world is somehow turning into a hugely embarrassing fiasco @garbageape : Musk's talent for fucking over everyone he partners with is by far his most redeeming quality. Tom Nichols / @radiofreetom : Wait, I'm listening now. Is....is he...reading a speech into a Twitter Spaces? omg Ben Rosen / @ben_rosen : smart of desantis to start his campaign by highlighting his speaking voice, something that's both normal and enjoyable to hear Jeff Tiedrich / @itsjefftiedrich : holy fucking shit, Ron DeSantis's campaign launch crashed and burned faster than a Tesla Jon Lovett / @jonlovett : Twitter creates the innovative, unprecedented opportunity to read your stump speech like you're a hostage to a 140k audience of reporters and online freaks who all would have watched on TV too @vaushv : remember when AOC held 435,000 viewers in a VIDEO stream and it was just her playing Among Us [image] Mike Drucker / @mikedrucker : Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis celebrating their humiliation fetish in the most humiliating way possible https://twitter.com/... Mike Drucker / @mikedrucker : I love the spin that Elon and DeSantis “broke the internet” because Twitter servers kept crashing. It's like calling the time I left my plastic spatula too close to the stove “breaking the food industry” Rick Wilson / @therickwilson : What a small, grumpy claque of incels and whiners. Brian Tashman / @briantashman : https://twitter.com/... [image] Justin Baragona / @justinbaragona : So Ron DeSantis is slamming the media for being in a “bubble” among the elites — during a chat with two billionaires in an online chat that was only heard by a small percentage of people on this platform. Emily Bell / @emilybell : ‘Thank god the voices of ordinary people can be heard’...say the former world's richest man, the Governor from Harvard and Yale, the Stanford VC billionaire, the Tesla owning congressman . Those crusading anti-elitists Mike Drucker / @mikedrucker : It's always a good sign when your main political rival announced his first campaign by descending a golden escalator and you announced your campaign by asking if anyone could hear you before getting kicked out of the chat room Judd Legum / @juddlegum : DESANTIS: “There has not been a single book banned in Florida.” MUSK: Oh, thanks informing me FACT: There are hundreds of books banned in Florida schools and hundreds of thousands unavailable to students pending review Jon Favreau / @jonfavs : Ron DeSantis attacks media for being in a bubble from his Twitter Spaces conversation populated mostly by media elites, hosted by 2 guys who are joining him in just bitching about the media. FINGER ON THE PULSE Hamilton Nolan / @hamiltonnolan : Launching my presidential campaign on ham radio Rob / @robrousseau : (while trying to do something cool I fall into a big pile of trash and a stray dog bites my dick, causing dozens of bystanders to laugh at me) No such thing as bad publicity 😎 [image] Jason O. Gilbert / @gilbertjasono : It's kinda wonky, but here's the technical explanation for what happened: Twitter's servers heard Ron DeSantis's speaking voice and killed themselves George Conway / @gtconway3d : look you can't blame DeSantis—apparently a large anthropomorphic animated mouse got into the control room and chewed up the feed wire @theserfstv : [image] Ashwin Rodrigues / @shwinyo : Holy cow! The Musk DeSantis Twitter Space had over 500 million American viewers, according to the engineer we asked while we dangled his family over the ledge of a building we don't pay rent for. @jpbrammer : as president I promise to run the country like a business (shuttered within months, embarrassing tweets) Mark Harris / @markharrisnyc : Today in “The important thing is that the rocket cleared the launchpad!” [image] Pete Syme / @pwsyme : Elon Musk made the pretty grand claim that Ron DeSantis' glitchy announcement was “the top story on Earth” yesterday I had a look at some of the world's newspapers and Google search data to show how that's not true 👇 https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : LOL. TFG https://twitter.com/... @jordanuhl : Ron DeSantis' Twitter Spaces campaign launch has, so far, featured: -Several minutes of silence -Random throat clearing -Muffled commentary from Elon Musk about why Spaces isn't working -Hosts, including DeSantis disappearing Great start to his campaign! [video] Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : On a call with conservative journalists last night, “DeSantis opened with a joke about how Musk offered him a choice between a SpaceX rocket ride and Twitter, and he thought Twitter would be safer.” https://www.nationalreview.com/ ... Scott Galloway / @profgalloway : The Jungle Cat, keeping it real. https://twitter.com/... @meidastouch : Wow. The Twitter Spaces launch for Ron DeSantis with Elon Musk is an absolute disaster. The Spaces function kept glitching out. When they finally were able to get the functionality to work, there was massive echo and feedback before the entire session went silent again. One of... https://twitter.com/... Ben Collins / @oneunderscore__ : Fox News' homepage really twisting the knife on Elon Musk right now. The homepage even has a “Breaking News” alert pop-up dunking on Twitter's failure. [image] Matt Binder / @mattbinder : this is hands down one of the most bizarre campaign videos i've ever seen why does random stock footage of Elon Musk take up more than half of your presidential campaign announcement video. is he your running mate? https://twitter.com/... Emily Bell / @emilybell : ....An event which showcased technical incompetence, delivered with the charisma and panache of a 4th quarter earnings call, and which had the seemingly impossible outcome of making people think more positively about Donald Trump and Fox News... https://twitter.com/... Scott Galloway / @profgalloway : Last night, I announced my candidacy for (FL) Senate on Foursquare. Dozens of people on hand, crashed the site. Jon Stewart / @jonstewart : It'd be like if the escalator had just stopped halfway down... Ken Klippenstein / @kenklippenstein : Evergreen [image] Matt Binder / @mattbinder : so Twitter couldn't run the DeSantis Twitter Space on Elon's account, had to use David Sacks' much smaller account, and from what I saw barely cracked 250k concurrent listeners... and they're acting like some sort of history was made with that attendance? lol Mario Nawfal / @marionawfal : Trump just posted this video making fun of DeSantis. I have to admit, I couldn't stop laughing😂 Trump spaces soon? [video] Paul E Williams / @pewilliams_ : So far (5 minutes) on this twitter space, the app has crashed 4 times, DeSantis has been demoted from speaker to listener 3 times, and Elon and David seem to have their mics in the same room pointing at each other so there's constantly feedback. https://twitter.com/... @jordanuhl : Doing an audio-only campaign launch on a notoriously buggy platform really underscores just how stupid DeSantis is. Spaces buckling under the weight of just 300K users when even the worst performing cable news primetime hour gets 2x+ views, doesn't crash, and offers video. Matthew Ellis / @matthiasellis : the second after DeSantis left the Twitter space the first voice said “wow. incredibly boring” lmao Ben Shapiro / @benshapiro : Tonight was a perfect encapsulation of the campaign. If you're obsessed with the optics of the Twitter Spaces glitch, then you're probably not going to vote DeSantis. If you're interested in political substance, DeSantis is likely your candidate. @junlper : ok i give up on the ron desantis presidential campaign space, this is a disaster of a campaign launch, looks like desantis lost connection, no one in there is talking now, sitting in the space has crashed my app 3 times. i cannot wait for trumps statement on this mess @ettingermentum : This is the full video of DeSantis with Hitler and the devil posted on Trump's Instagram [video] Francis Wolf / @francisxwolf : he just destroyed ron and elon [video] @jmood88 : https://twitter.com/... [video] Ben Smith / @semaforben : Nobody is happier than Fox News, which is going to make sure every Republican primary voter sees this one [image] James / @gravitysra1nbow : YEAH SO DESANTIS TRIED ANNOUNCING HIS CAMPAIGN ON TWITTER SPACES BUT IT WAS A TOTAL DISASTER WITH DAVID SACKS RAMBLING ABOUT DOGECOIN AND IT CRASHED LIKE 5 TIMES—NOW TRUMP JUST DROPPED A PARODY OF IT WITH AN AI VERSION OF ADOLF HITLER AND DICK CHENEY [image] Sam Alberti / @sam_alberti : Ron DeSantis' campaign launch: [image] Eoin Higgins / @eoinhiggins_ : Man what https://twitter.com/... [image] Maxwell Alejandro Frost / @maxwellfrostfl : one of the worst websites I've ever seen [image] @acabylonbee : can't believe this is how he announced [image] @lib_crusher : Trump was barely online. He just posted a lot. He genuinely doesn't have the attention span to wade deep into the psychotic culture war stuff even though he probably agrees with it. The DeSantis operation is all about attracting and appeasing those online culture warriors https://twitter.com/... @populismupdates : Against all odds we could actually have a funny campaign season [image] Patrick Ruffini / @patrickruffini : Trump was a political mastermind for his Twitter use, but DeSantis is “way too online.” Elon Musk / @elonmusk : All Presidential candidates are most welcome on this platform Emily Gorcenski / @emilygorcenski : Wow so you mean deleting the data centers and firing everyone led to major technical issues during a key launch? If only someone could have foreseen this! https://cnn.com/... Tom Gara / @tomgara : BuzzFeed exploding the watermelon hit 820,000 concurrent viewers in 2016 https://twitter.com/... @bestofdyingtwit : elon just said “i'd like to introduce ron” and then THERE WAS AN ECHO LIKE IT WAS MOCKING HIM “i'd like to introduce ron” and then he said “i've never seen anything like this before” and the echo said “i've never seen anything like this before” and then my app crashed again ahaha Dan Primack / @danprimack : Live look at Tucker Carlson, who decided to broadcast his new show on Twitter [image] Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : I will say that Twitter is a great platform for content on Elon's various and sundry fuckups running Twitter. https://twitter.com/... [image] Jon Passantino / @passantino : Why did Twitter Spaces totally meltdown tonight with just a few hundred thousand listeners? It's a “janky” product. “Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” a former Twitter employee tells @donie. “It's a beta test that never ended.” https://www.cnn.com/... Matt Binder / @mattbinder : Elon Musk did that Twitter Space with the BBC last month and there were like one or two million people listening at midnight what in the world did Musk do to Twitter Spaces since then that they couldn't handle roughly 600k listeners Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : I think she might be leaving something out https://twitter.com/... Alejandra Caraballo / @esqueer_ : Oh my god, they didn't even stress test or prep live spaces ahead of time for this. This is one of the most incompetent moments in tech history. https://twitter.com/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Sean Spicer vibes here https://twitter.com/... Molly White / @molly0xfff : “multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100M followers, which is Elon's account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented.” - tech expert David Sacks, who is definitely not just grasping in the dark https://www.theverge.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : NYT: Twitter employees “had been alarmed by Mr. Musk's turn into politics and whether the social media site could handle the influx of traffic, three employees said. There was no planning for what are known as ‘site reliability issues’ for the event...” https://www.nytimes.com/... Lance Storm / @lancestorm : Well you do want these things to be memorable. 🤷♂️ https://twitter.com/... @mat : Fantastic job all around https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : No advance prep? Idiot. https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Ok now Joe from Scranton has entered the room with an epic dunk. https://twitter.com/... Chris Hayes / @chrislhayes : One thing you learn when you start doing TV is just the awe-inspiring amount of technology and devoted labor that goes into broadcasting to million of people live. It obviously feels invisible and seamless as a consumer, but it's an enormous undertaking. Brianna Wu / @briannawu : As a loyal Democrat, thank you @elonmusk for kneecapping the DeSantis campaign right out of the gate. Flatline Ron will have a hard time coming back from this. 😂 https://www.theverge.com/... Mehdi Hasan / @mehdirhasan : Biden is trolling Musk and DeSantis in real time. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer