If the Platformer story that I posted earlier today isn’t enough to highlight the fact that Elon Musk and Twitter are in deep trouble, Fast Company piles on with this story that highlights how Twitter’s staffing issues are creating a death spiral for the company:
Twitter’s outage on Wednesday, which saw the site rendered unusable for most users by blocking people from tweeting within the app, accessing or sending direct messages, and following new users, shows that the social media giant is stuck in a Sisyphean nightmare.
The company needs to update its systems to enact the changes Elon Musk wants to make to the platform (things like extending the maximum tweet length and overhauling the algorithm that presents tweets to users). But, following mass layoffs by Musk, Twitter is now short-staffed, according to former staff, some of whom have contacts still within Twitter, and has been forced to instigate frequent code freezes, preventing the deployment of iterative changes to the platform’s codebase. That means vast volumes of code changes are pushed out at once when they do happen—so if anything goes wrong, it’s difficult to unpick what’s to blame.
Musk has responded to significant outages, such as the one this week, by introducing further freezes until the underlying issue is identified—which former staff say simply kicks the problem down the road.
The problem appears to be one of Musk’s own making. By getting rid of so many long-tenured staff, it appears Twitter has routed its institutional knowledge about how the platform works and interacts with other parts of the app.
Fast Company has seen conversations among former Twitter engineers suggesting that Twitter cannot identify what caused the most recent outage because it has tried to push out too many new code changes at once, and it’s impossible to identify which of the changes caused the issue. Other former Twitter engineers suggested to Fast Company that the problem of bundling so many changes into a single new release of the app is due to deploying so many code freezes.
This is like a house of cards where one wrong move will bring the entire platform down. And the blame lies with Elon as his “ready, fire, aim” mentality has not only created this situation, but will likely be the root cause of Twitter’s ultimate downfall. Which based on this and the Platformer story from earlier, illustrates that Twitter is doomed. It’s just a matter of when at this point.