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.
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.
"We've got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers," Sacks said at one point.
More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis' announcement by nearly half an hour.
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.
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.
Musk and David 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.
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.
