Ron DeSantis' widely anticipated presidential campaign announcement was off to a rocky, if not disastrous, start on Wednesday night.
The Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful appeared on a Twitter Spaces event co-hosted by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Craft Ventures co-founder David Sacks had such a vast audience that the app crashed several times in the first few minutes of the event.
The tragic start to DeSantis' major announcement, which so far has fallen short of giving Republicans what they desired, infuriated people across America, who quickly took to Twitter to air their complaints, calling the launch "disastrous".
Newsweek reached out to DeSantis' presidential campaign by email for comment.
The overwhelmed servers were only the start to the kickoff that was doomed by myriad technical failures including glitches, echoes, deafening feedback and only snippets of comments from Musk and Sacks during the first 20 minutes, though none from DeSantis. Sacks blamed the technical difficulties on the massive number of people tuning into Twitter Spaces, which was at nearly half a million as of 6:13 p.m. Eastern time.
Sacks, however, called it a "good sign" that the servers were melting before his audio again went silent.
At approximately 6:15 p.m., the online video conference started playing instrumental music before crashing again. A few moments later, the Twitter Spaces event was no longer live, although interested listeners were able to play the glitchy recording.
Musk restarted Twitter Spaces shortly after 6:20 p.m. when DeSantis was finally able to clearly announce his presidential bid without being interrupted by technical failures. However, the administrators for the event capped the attendance, and people were unable to enter the Twitter Spaces conversation shortly after it restarted. Musk credited his massive following as the reason behind the glitches.
The event's technical issues were remedied and the event ran smoothly for the rest of the time, with many of the speakers, including DeSantis, complimenting Musk on his work revolutionizing Twitter as a platform protecting "free speech".
The event stretched more than 20 minutes over schedule as DeSantis attempted to answer questions from pre-determined contributors, such as Congress member Thomas Massie and talk show host Steve Deace. The virtual floor was not opened to journalists or members of the public joining the conversation.
The event ended with Musk extending a Twitter Spaces invitation to other presidential candidates. He followed up the invitation with a tweet published shortly after the event ended.
"All Presidential candidates are most welcome on this platform," Musk tweeted.
All Presidential candidates are most welcome on this platform
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2023
Update 5/24/2023, 8:22 ET: This article was updated with additional information.
