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
Eurovision Sport, Camb.ai to provide live subtitling for Paralympic Winter Games
- Partnership aims to increase accessibility for all audiences
- Milano Cortina Games run from Friday to March 15
LONDON: Eurovision Sport, the European Broadcasting Union’s free-to-air streaming platform, will provide live and on-demand subtitling for coverage of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games in partnership with AI language company Camb.ai
The service will run across all competition days, allowing viewers to stream all six Paralympic Winter Games sports on Eurovision Sport with real-time subtitles. The Games open on Friday and run through March 15.
Camb.ai will supply contextual speech-to-text transcription for both live and catch-up coverage, which the organizers said would support accessibility without altering the editorial integrity of broadcasts.
Eurovision Sport Managing Director Alan Fagan said the aim was to make the Games available to “the widest possible audience,” by scaling up digital accessibility across every event on the platform.
The initiative forms part of the EBU’s most extensive digital coverage of a Paralympic Winter Games to date and complements member broadcasters’ linear output.
It also reflects a wider industry push to make live sport easier to follow for viewers watching without sound, people with hearing impairments and audiences consuming content on demand.
Camb.ai’s Chief Technology Officer Akshat Prakash said the company was proud to deepen its partnership with Eurovision Sport, describing the platform as a leader in applying new technology to sports coverage.
The two organizations began working together in 2024, when they delivered what they described as Europe’s first AI-powered real-time translated sports commentary during European Athletics events.
