The Twitter Spaces team, which formerly had as many as 100 employees, has been reduced to “roughly three” individuals, as per an IANS report. The revelation comes after the technical “fiasco” during Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2024 US presidential election attempt on the app this week.
The Spaces team has been functioning without the majority of the “institutional knowledge it accumulated since Twitter added live audio conversations in 2021 to compete with then-hot Clubhouse,” reported the Platformer.
“Practically no one remaining knows the current architecture in depth,” one person wrote on a pseudonymous employee forum called Blind, reported the Business Standard.
Twitter spaces crashed several times
The highly touted discussion between Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces did not go as planned, as the social networking platform failed many times, ruining the announcement.
About 678,000 people tuned in to listen as Twitter crashed repeatedly, and Musk blamed the issues on the large number of listeners.
The Spaces session was ultimately restarted, with around 304,000 listeners.
On Wednesday, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and personal friend of Musk, sought to kick off the gathering. “We’ve got so many people here that I think we’re kind of melting the servers,” he explained.
Bryan Gryphon, DeSantis’ campaign spokesman, stated on Twitter that the passion for DeSantis had “literally busted up the internet” and that the campaign had raised $1 million in an hour.
The hour-long interview on Twitter was aired without sound for significant sections of time, and thousands of individuals were either dropped or unable to participate.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who was hosting the chat, blamed the outages on servers not having enough capacity to handle the large number of individuals wanting to tune in.
Post launching another Spaces from the Twitter account of entrepreneur David Sacks, Musk apologised and said, “I think we’re definitely breaking new ground here. As far as I know, no major presidential candidate has ever announced candidacy on social media this way. So thank you for doing that.”
DeSantis will challenge Trump for the Republican nomination. However, he may have difficulties in the near future since he trails the former president in recent polls.
Musk stated a day before the formal declaration that they would be interviewing DeSantis because he has “quite an announcement to make,” and that this will be the first time something like this has happened on social media.
Musk stated that he will not back any one candidate at this time, but he is “interested in X/Twitter being somewhat of a public town square.”
The Twitter CEO also stated that the real-time queries and answers will not be “scripted.”
