ABC’s website crashed during the Tuesday night season 35 premiere of Dancing With the Stars, and Alfonso Ribeiro said the show was only accepting votes via text for Tuesday night’s premiere. That left Dancing with the Stars voting tied to a backup channel while the live elimination was still in motion.
Conner Leavitt Leaves First
Conner Leavitt became the first eliminated celebrity at the end of Tuesday’s premiere episode after competing with Adele Zaikman. The result came from the usual mix of judges’ scores and viewer votes, which makes the voting outage more than a technical footnote: the live tally was still part of deciding who stayed and who went.
Harry Shum Jr. finished at the top of the leaderboard among the men with a 21/30, a strong early position in a season that began with a two-night premiere split by gender. Tuesday night featured the eight male stars, while Wednesday night was reserved for the women, giving the show a staggered rollout instead of a single opening-night field.
Text Votes Only on Tuesday
Live voting takes place during the East Coast airing and ends shortly after the final performance is completed, while West Coast viewers must vote between 5 p.m. PT and roughly 6:45 p.m. PT. With the website down, the text option became the only route for viewers to get ballots in during Tuesday’s premiere, so the crash did not pause the elimination clock.
The workaround mattered because the show’s elimination rule depends on the lowest combined total of judges’ scores and viewer votes. When voting shifts from a website to text only, the mechanics stay intact, but the path into the final count narrows for anyone relying on the web rather than the broadcast’s text instructions.
Season 35 Draws 6.67 Million
The season 35 premiere drew 6.67 million viewers, a 24 percent increase from last year’s debut of 5.38 million. It was also the most-watched premiere since season 29 in September 2020, which gives ABC a clear early win even with the voting disruption baked into the broadcast.
The women’s side moved into Wednesday night’s episode after each of the female celebrities performed to a No. 1 song from the year they were born. For viewers who voted on Tuesday, the immediate takeaway is simple: the show absorbed the website failure by shifting voting to text, and the elimination still moved forward on schedule.
