The official launch of Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential bid got off to a rocky start after Twitter's platform struggled to stay online.

Twitter owner Elon Musk said that the multiple issues were due to "the servers straining somewhat," before he too lost connection to the stream.

DeSantis had planned to announce his bid on a Twitter Space, a first for a presidential candidate, after Musk had repeatedly voiced support for the Florida governor.

But it took 30 minutes into the audio-only events launch for DeSantis to be able to say “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback."

When the Space first opened it lasted a few minutes before crashing and had multiple technical issues.

“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," moderator David Sacks, a venture capitalist, and former PayPal product lead, said.

In total about 600,000 users joined that session, less than video streams on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.

But unlike those platforms, Twitter has gone through a drastic period of downsizing over the past few months.

After buying the company for $44 billion last year, Musk closed one of the company's three main data centers over Christmas and began to cut cloud costs (including refusing to pay for Amazon Web Services).

At the same time, more than 70 percent of the company's staff were laid off, and server-heavy new features were rolled out including lengthy video uploads for Twitter Blue subscribers.

The moves have strained the service, leading to multiple outages and technical errors in 2023.