Once again, Platformer has got to scoop on what’s happening inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. In today’s episode, the have details about today’s Twitter’s latest dirt nap. And it illustrates the effects of Elon’s cost cutting measures:
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
Elon Musk was furious, we’re told.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.
“There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” one current employee says.
Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.
But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. And just as former employees have predicted from the start, the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages.
Yeah. Elon’s got a major problem on his hands. He’s basically backed himself into a corner where he doesn’t have the resources to run Twitter and keep it stable. And there’s no clear path for him to exit that corner. Which basically means that we need to buckle up as things are about to get even more turbulent than they already are in the Twitterverse.
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This entry was posted on March 6, 2023 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Twitter Took A Dirt Nap Today Because Of A Single Engineer
Once again, Platformer has got to scoop on what’s happening inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. In today’s episode, the have details about today’s Twitter’s latest dirt nap. And it illustrates the effects of Elon’s cost cutting measures:
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
Elon Musk was furious, we’re told.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.
“There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” one current employee says.
Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.
But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. And just as former employees have predicted from the start, the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages.
Yeah. Elon’s got a major problem on his hands. He’s basically backed himself into a corner where he doesn’t have the resources to run Twitter and keep it stable. And there’s no clear path for him to exit that corner. Which basically means that we need to buckle up as things are about to get even more turbulent than they already are in the Twitterverse.
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This entry was posted on March 6, 2023 at 4:10 pm 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.