The IT Nerd

If Elon Musk thought the weekend would bring some respite from the feeling of doom that is around Twitter these days. Especially with his Donald Trump is back on Twitter stunt from last night, I am going to put it out there that he is wrong. First up is the fact that CBS News has suspending posting on Twitter:

“In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan Vigliotti, CBS News national correspondent, said in a report about the latest chaos at the company on the “CBS Evening News” Friday.

A statement with nearly identical wording was shared Friday by the Twitter account of KPIX, the CBS-owned station in San Francisco.

Currently, the most recent post on @CBSNews is a retweet of a segment shared at 3:38 p.m. ET about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to oversee investigations into Donald Trump. On @CBSEveningNews, the most recent tweet is story about a dog that “turned herself in to police after getting lost during a walk,” which was posted at 5 p.m. ET; @CBSMornings last posted at 3:30 p.m. ET, linking to an article about users speculating about “whether Twitter will live or die.”

I’m calling it now, this will spur other news agencies to do the same thing. That in turn will make Twitter less valuable to people who visit Twitter to get news form CBS, NBC, ABC, Reuters, and others. That in turn make Twitter less valuable to advertisers and take money out of Elon’s pockets. But that’s not the worst news for him. This is:

Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events.

The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform’s team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages.

“Between the lack of preparations and the lack of staffing, I think it’s going to be a rough World Cup for Twitter,” said the former employee.

He suggested that an incident of some kind – such as a service responding slowly or incorrectly – is almost a certainty during the 29-day competition in Qatar, estimating a 90% possibility of something going wrong that users would see.

The likelihood of Twitter staying online during the competition, which kicks off on Sunday, is no better than even, according to the former employee.

Twitter is “likely to struggle with traffic at kickoff, and may crash,” he said. “If we’re lucky, it will recover with minimal disruption.”

If anything happens to Twitter that users can see, it will be a terminal event for Elon. He’ll burn through any credibility that he has left, and it will send any advertisers that are left on the platform running for the nearest exit. At that point, he’d be screwed with no way back. Seeing as the World Cup starts today, we won’t have long to wait. And I will be watching.

Maybe Elon should refocus his priorities? Just a thought.

This entry was posted on November 20, 2022 at 8:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.