By Sheila Dang
(Reuters) -Twitter crashed repeatedly on Wednesday during a highly anticipated live audio chat between Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hampering the politician’s announcement he is running for the Republican presidential nomination.
Since Musk took over the social media platform in October, he has laid off thousands of employees including many engineers who were responsible for fixing software bugs.
Current and former Twitter employees previously told Reuters the steep layoffs would put the platform at risk of crashing during times of high traffic.
“We’ve got so many people here that I think we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” said David Sacks, a venture capitalist and close friend of Musk, while attempting to start the event on Wednesday.
The Spaces session resumed about 25 minutes after it was supposed to kick off, with about 241,000 users tuning in to listen.
“Failure to Launch”, “Crashed” and #DeSaster were among the trending Twitter topics in the U.S. during the chat session.
In between crashes, U.S. President Joe Biden poked fun at the shaky rollout of DeSantis’ presidential bid by tweeting out a fundraising appeal: “This link works.”
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Leslie Adler and Lisa Shumaker)
