Thursday May 25, 2023
Twitter experienced several crashes during a highly anticipated live audio chat between Elon Musk, the platform's owner, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Technical glitches prevented DeSantis from announcing his Republican presidential bid. Since Musk took over Twitter in October, he has initiated widespread layoffs, including many engineers responsible for fixing software bugs.
Current and former Twitter employees have previously raised concerns, saying significant workforce reductions would leave the platform vulnerable to crashes during periods of high traffic. As the event began on Wednesday, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk, acknowledged the strain on the servers, saying, "We have so many people here that I think we're kind of melting the servers down, which is a good sign."
The number of listeners, along with Musk's extensive Twitter following, has been blamed for the problems. Despite repeated crashes, approximately 678,000 people tuned in to listen to the chat. Eventually, the Spaces session resumed and reached approximately 304,000 listeners.
Last month, when Musk was interviewed by the BBC on Twitter Spaces, around 3 million people listened. However, frequent outages have become more common since Musk took ownership of Twitter. In March, many users reported difficulty accessing links posted on the platform. The incident marked Twitter's sixth major outage since the start of the year, compared with three during the same period last year, according to internet watchdog NetBlocks.
When the accidents happened on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden took the opportunity to mock DeSantis' presidential bid by tweeting a call for the fundraiser with the comment: "This link works." Disruptive incidents during the chat session led to "Failure to Launch", "Crashed" and #DeSaster trending on Twitter in the United States.
The repeated technical issues faced by Twitter under Musk's ownership raise concerns about the stability and reliability of the platform, especially during critical events and periods of high user activity. Layoffs of experienced engineers responsible for bug fixes seemingly contributed to the platform's vulnerability to crashes and highlighted the need for efficient infrastructure and support to ensure uninterrupted service to users.
