<div style="text-align: justify; "><b style="font-size: 1rem;">Twitter’s livestream event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of users logged on to hear DeSantis announce his bid for the White House.</b><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sound from the livestream event — which was held on Twitter Spaces and hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks — cut in and out in the first minutes after starting.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis’ announcement by nearly half an hour. When the event was relaunched using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users ultimately listened in.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Twitter has faced a variety of outages and technical issues since Musk took over the platform late last year. Shortly after acquiring the company, Musk laid off large numbers of technical and other staff and reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In recent months, Twitter has faced multiple service outages that affected the ability of thousands of users to access the site, to view images and to read tweets on their timelines. Users have also previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Musk and Sacks admitted on Wednesday that the limited capacity of Twitter’s servers played into the issues it faced getting the DeSantis event underway. “I think you broke the internet there,” Sacks said when the event was relaunched.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The pair added that Musk’s following of more than 140 million users may have also contributed to the issue. “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented,” Sacks said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Attempting to spin the launch issue in a positive direction, Sacks said: “You know you’re breaking new ground when there’s bugs and scaling issues.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Twitter’s Spaces product was not necessarily built to host events with hundreds of thousands of listeners. Most other Spaces have — at most — several hundred listeners at a time. Spaces was described as a “prototype” and “janky” tool by a former Twitter employee familiar with its development.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the former employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">They added that Spaces relies on a mix of Twitter’s technical infrastructure and Amazon Web Services servers, “things that aren’t intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Twitter acquired the video streaming platform Periscope in 2015. The former employee said Twitter Spaces had been built on Periscope’s existing infrastructure and not integrated with Twitter properly — which likely contributed to Wednesday’s technical problems.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After restarting, the event ran for close to an hour. Sacks acknowledged the glitch again at the end, saying, “It’s not how you started, it’s how you finish and we finished strong.” CNN</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>