Early Ron DeSantis presidential campaign plummets in Twitter troubles

A highly anticipated Twitter event at which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis planned to announce his 2024 Republican presidential candidacy was repeatedly interrupted on Wednesday when Twitter’s servers apparently couldn’t handle the surge in traffic.

Some Twitter users have reported that the app crashed while trying to listen to the event where Twitter owner Elon Musk joined DeSantis for the announcement.

At times, DeSantis’ account appeared absent from the audio-only event on the feature known as Twitter Spaces. Measurements posted by Twitter indicated that more than 600,000 were trying to listen.

“We are reallocating some server capacity to be able to handle the load here. It gets really crazy,” Musk said at one point.

DeSantis was finally able to speak, about 20 minutes into the scheduled start, after Musk shut down the initial Twitter Spaces event and launched a second on the app. This space attracted about 161,000 users, according to public data from Twitter, as DeSantis read a short speech.

“I’m running for President of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis’ opponents reveled in the problems.

“Glitchy. Technical issues. Uncomfortable silences. Complete launch failure. And that’s just the candidate!” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman for former President Donald Trump, told NBC News.

President Joe Biden’s Twitter account job a link to their own fundraising page, writing “This link works”.

The DeSantis campaign, however, insisted the technical issues showed how many people were flooding Twitter, hungry for his campaign.

“Governor DeSantis broke the internet – that should tell you everything you need to know about the strength of his candidacy,” a senior campaign official said.

DeSantis also posted a kickoff video Wednesday night, saying he was ready to lead a “Great American Comeback.”

“Our border is a mess. Crime is infesting our cities. The feds are making it harder for families to make ends meet. And the president is floundering,” DeSantis said in the spot.

Dasha burns, Jonathan Allen And Vaughn Hillyard contributed.