Twitter Spaces crashed during DeSantis' 2024 campaign launch and lost half the room

On May 24, 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis became the first presidential hopeful to announce a campaign on Twitter Spaces, hosted by Elon Musk and investor David Sacks. Musk had touted Spaces as a way for any candidate to 'get the highest possible audience.' Instead the audio session glitched for nearly 30 minutes with feedback, garbled audio and users kicked out; Musk had to spin up an entirely new Spaces session, telling users Twitter was 'reallocating some of the server capability to be able to handle the load here.'

More than half of the initial roughly 600,000 listeners ditched the event - briefly including DeSantis himself - and only about 161,000 heard the speech, a smaller audience than videos of AOC playing a game on Twitch, Buzzfeed exploding a watermelon, or April the Giraffe giving birth. Donald Trump's campaign called it 'a complete failure to launch,' and Biden's campaign tweeted its own fundraising link with the caption 'This link works.'

An anonymous former Twitter employee told CNN Spaces was 'largely a prototype, not a finished product' and 'a beta test that never ended,' built on Periscope's infrastructure after Twitter bought it and never properly integrated. Musk had laid off or purged most of the Spaces team in early December 2022, the same month he temporarily disabled Spaces over a bug that let banned journalists use the feature. Yet a Musk Spaces event in March 2023 had drawn 1.2 million listeners with seemingly no issues, indicating degraded engineering rather than raw demand was to blame.

Over half of a roughly 600,000-listener audience bailed; about 161,000 heard the speech; 'DeSaster' trended as rivals mocked the launch

Musk fired or purged most of the Spaces team months before volunteering the feature for its highest-stakes broadcast.

Spaces ran across multiple services a former employee said 'aren't intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic,' on Periscope infrastructure never properly integrated.

A March 2023 Spaces event had handled 1.2 million listeners without incident, so demand alone did not explain the crash - the depleted team's product did.

DeSantis promoted the event only via a campaign video, never from his own accounts, betting his launch on a platform that then failed him.

A flagship demo runs on your weakest system: after gutting a team, do not schedule its prototype for your biggest live audience.

Musk and Sacks spun the event as a success - Sacks said 'it's not how you started, it's how you finish, and we finished strong,' and Musk claimed Twitter signups went 'ballistic,' inviting all candidates to host Spaces events. Musk later walked back his seeming endorsement of DeSantis. The crash became shorthand for Twitter's instability after roughly 80% staff cuts.