The unconventional launch of the presidential campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter was beset by technical glitches which delayed by nearly 30 minutes his formal announcement that he is running for the White House.
The problems with the Twitter Space event on Wednesday led to Mr DeSantis being mocked by both his Republican rival Donald Trump and US president Joe Biden.
As hundreds of thousands of people sought to listen to the conversation between Mr DeSantis and Twitter owner Elon Musk, the audio-only platform was plagued by glitches.
Listeners initially heard silences, distant voices and echoes before the event stopped completely.
At one point Mr Musk was heard saying that the servers were “straining somewhat”.
“We’ve got just a massive number of people online”, he said.
The event eventually restarted using a different account nearly 30 minutes after the scheduled start time.
By the time the process recommenced, the numbers listening had fallen off considerably.
About 678,000 people had tuned in initially to listen to Mr DeSantis announce his campaign for the White House.
However, following the repeated crashes, when the event resumed it eventually reached just over 300,000 people.
The DeSantis campaign tweeted that “it seems we broke the internet with so much excitement”.
However, Mr DeSantis’ opponents moved quickly to ridicule him.
As the DeSantis campaign launch on Twitter experienced its problems, the president tweeted: “This link works” – pointing to a page where donors could make a contribution to the Biden/Harris re-election campaign.
The Trump campaign described the DeSantis Twitter Space event as: “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!”
“Failure to Launch”, “crashed” and #DeSaster were among the trending Twitter topics in the US on Wednesday evening.
Mr Trump himself forecast the DeSantis presidential campaign would be “a disaster”.
In his Twitter Space conversation Mr DeSantis said he was running for president to “lead our great American comeback”. He maintained the country was “going in the wrong direction”.
He said if he secured the Republican Party nomination he would win the presidency in 2024.
“No excuses, I will get the job done”, he said.
In what may be seen as an implicit criticism of Mr Trump, whom many Republicans hold responsible for the party’s poor results in midterm elections last November, Mr DeSantis said “there is no substitute for victory”.
“We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years. The tired dogmas of the past are inadequate for a vibrant future. We must look forward, not backwards.”
Mr DeSantis said on his first day in the White House he would declare a national emergency in relation to the US southern border. He said he would build a border wall and would not entertain asylum claims from people who crossed illegally into the United States.
In a later interview on Fox News on Wednesday Mr DeSantis said if elected he would immediately remove the head of the FBI.
He said he would “not keep Chris Wray,” current director of the FBI, and that there would be a new head of the agency “on day one.”
