How did announcing a presidential campaign ‘melt the Internet’?

If you’re planning on announcing that you’re running for president, it’s probably best not to host the event on Twitter for the time being. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis learned that the hard way this week when he got on the platform with CEO Elon Musk to announce his bid for the Oval Office.

The event was scheduled to be held in a Twitter Spaces audio-only session on Wednesday evening, featuring DeSantis and Musk with David Sacks, a former PayPal executive, moderating. But things went wrong from the get-go when viewers were treated to a bad screeching sound rather than any opening dialog. Musk and DeSantis were able to connect, but as soon as Sacks tried to join they disappeared.

Eventually they got things up and running using a new Space, about a half hour after things were supposed to start. It seems that Twitter’s servers just weren’t prepared to handle the number of people who tried to tune into the initial event. It reportedly had more than half a million people tuned in and was growing by 50,000 attendees a minute at the scheduled start time. “I think we melted the Internet there,” Sacks commented. Fortunately, things ran smoothly in the new Space with about 890,000 listeners.