The glitch-filled launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Wednesday on Twitter was reportedly caused by massive staff reductions and shrinking server capacity.
DeSantis' announcement was set for Twitter Spaces, a digital town square where users can join as a listener to a host or co-hosts. Twitter owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks, who has ties to Musk and is a DeSantis supporter, were co-hosts of the event.
More than 500,000 people were waiting for more than 20 minutes for the event to start, and many who joined were frequently kicked out. The first audio livestream crashed before DeSantis could make his announcement. The second drew about 700,000 listeners at its peak.
The Substack newsletter Platform, citing unnamed sources, reported on Friday that Musk had reduced the team working on Twitter Spaces from what at one time was about 100 employees down to "roughly three people."
"For months now, the Spaces team has been operating without most of the institutional knowledge it accumulated since Twitter added live audio conversations in 2021 to compete with then-hot Clubhouse," Platform reported.
According to one source,"Practically no one remaining knows the current architecture in depth."
After the event, Foad Dabiri, Twitter's head of engineering, announced his resignation.
"After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday," he tweeted Thursday. "The combination of the fantastic community, the impact it has, and its limitless potential sets Twitter apart."
In a tweet Friday, Dabiri wrote that his resignation had nothing to do with the glitch-filled DeSantis event.
"And since some have asked, my decision and the timing of it are independent of any recent events," he wrote.
The Daily Beast reported on Friday that Twitter Spaces relies on servers from Amazon Web Services that are "insanely underprovisioned."
CNN reported on Thursday that Twitter in recent months has faced multiple service outages that affected the ability of users to access the site, to view images, and to read tweets on their timelines. Musk and Sacks admitted on Wednesday that the limited capacity of Twitter's servers played a role in the delayed start to DeSantis' event. They added that Musk's following of more than 140 million on Twitter might have also contributed to the issue.
"I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon's account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented," Sacks said.