LONDON: 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.
Musk attributed the problems to the number of listeners and his large Twitter following.
About 678,000 people tuned in to listen as Twitter suffered repeated crashes.
The Spaces session eventually resumed, reaching about 304,000 listeners.
About 3 million people listened to Musk’s interview with the BBC on Twitter Spaces last month.
“Failure to Launch,” “Crashed” and #DeSaster were among the trending Twitter topics in the US during the chat session.
Twitter outages have been more numerous under Musk’s ownership. In March, thousands of users reported problems accessing links posted on the platform.
Internet observatory NetBlocks said the March incident was Twitter’s sixth
major outage
since the year began, compared with three in the same period last year.
In between crashes on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden poked fun at the shaky rollout of DeSantis’ presidential bid by tweeting out a fundraising appeal: “This link works.”
Twitter crashes during Ron DeSantis US presidential run announcement
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Twitter crashes during Ron DeSantis US presidential run announcement
- Florida Governor used Twitter Spaces to announce presidential candidacy
- Glitches were attributed to high traffic, software bugs
Tunisian journalist Chatha BelHajj Mubarak freed after sentence cut
- The court cut her sentence from five years to two, making her eligible for immediate release, her brother told Reuters
TUNIS: A Tunisian appeal court on Wednesday ordered the release of journalist Chatha BelHajj Mubarak, jailed since 2023 in a conspiracy case, after reducing her prison sentence, her family said.
The court cut her sentence from five years to two, making her eligible for immediate release, her brother told Reuters.
She was convicted in the so-called “Instalingo” case, which involved politicians, media figures and other defendants accused of conspiracy and financial crimes. BelHajj Mubarak denied the charges.
“Chatha is free and leaving prison,” her brother, Amen BelHajj Mubarak, said.
He said her health had severely deteriorated during her time in prison. She suffered serious complications, including significant hearing loss, and was diagnosed with cancer in detention, he added.
Tunisian authorities have said the case stems from judicial investigations into alleged financial and security-related offenses, and have rejected accusations by opposition groups that the prosecutions were politically motivated.
Tunisian prosecutors are pursuing a number of high-profile conspiracy cases involving politicians, journalists and activists. Several opposition leaders have received lengthy prison terms.
