The IT Nerd

So even on Christmas Eve, we’re still talking about Elon Musk and the dumb things that he wants to do in his desperate attempts to cut costs at Twitter. The latest brainwave that he’s had is to shrink the number of data centres that Twitter runs:

Twitter is shutting down its data center in Sacramento, and will downsize its facility in Atlanta, Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer reports.

The company operates three main facilities in the US, with its remaining site in Portland, Oregon, expected to take the increased load. It is not clear if Twitter has done an analysis of the migration and whether the remaining servers can handle the load. The move is expected to happen as soon as early January.

Twitter also has cloud contracts with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, but new owner Elon Musk is believed to be trying to renegotiate the contracts and cut expenses.

Now this cannot be stressed enough, pardon the pun. Having multiple data centres means that if an event happens where it puts increased load on Twitter’s infrastructure, there’s enough infrastructure to handle it. An example of this would be a major world event happens and people start Tweeting about it en masse. Seeing as Elon is a “ready, fire, aim” sort of guy, my guess is that he’s gambling that what remains of Twitter’s infrastructure can handle any load. You’ll excuse me if I am skeptical that this would be the case.

Then there’s this:

At the same time, he said that he plans to release new services that will require more storage and compute, including long-form high resolution video.

You need more compute power to run the things that you say that you want to bring to Twitter. But you’re cutting back on the compute power? Am I the only one here who fails to see the logic of what Elon is doing? I guess not based on this:

Former Twitter employee Sasha Solomon, who was fired after tweeting “sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” about Musk’s acquisition, responded to the data center closure report with: “Omfg like good luck when a failover needs to happen. So excited to see what 1-ish data center can do with all of Twitter’s traffic.”

Fellow former Twitter staffer Gerard Taylor added: “I’m just thinking about how many aurora files are hardcoded to only use SMF1. There’s going to be at least one outage guaranteed.”

Another ex-employee, Catherine Bonn, joked: “I mean, by the end of Q1 Twitter might have exponentially less traffic, so maybe it will work out fine?”

I’ve commented that since Elon took over at Twitter, he’s taking the platform on a suicide mission. And this move pretty much qualifies. But on a more serious note, Reuters reported on Friday that the company had removed the safety tool earlier in the week on orders from Elon. But in a now all too common U-turn, Elon has brought it back:

After publication of the story, Twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin confirmed the removal and called it temporary. “We have been fixing and revamping our prompts. They were just temporarily removed while we do that,” Irwin said in an email to Reuters.

“We expect to have them back up next week,” she said.

About 15 hours after the initial report, Musk, who did not initially respond to requests for comment, tweeted “False, it is still there.” In response to criticism by Twitter users, he also tweeted “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”

I am going to go out on a limb and say that the Reuters report is likely accurate, and the blow back from that from that report made Elon U-turn for the second time in a week. The first time was that ill conceived plan to prohibit users from linking to other social media sites which didn’t even make it to 24 hours. Again, this is Elon being a “ready, fire, aim” sort of guy who makes decisions without thinking about them. In the process he’s highlighting why Twitter is doomed.

You might recall that Elon locked out a bunch of journalists from Twitter because they were allegedly “doxing” him which is broadcasting his location to the world. Then after one of his infamous polls, he claimed that he was going to let them back on. Well, not so fast. The Washing Post is reporting that some journalists remain locked out of Twitter:

Twitter owner Elon Musk said last week that the journalists he abruptly suspended for alleged rule violations were welcome to rejoin the platform after only two days on the sidelines. “The people have spoken,” he tweeted following a poll that strongly favored restoring the accounts.

But Musk didn’t mention that there was a catch.

Twitter has privately demanded that the suspended journalists delete the tweets that drew Musk’s ire in the first place — a condition the reporters have refused to accept.

The result is a stalemate: The suspended journalists remain in Twitter purgatory, unable to access their accounts.

The tweets in question mentioned or linked to a Twitter account called @ElonJet, which tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet using publicly available flight data. All of the journalists were covering or commenting on Musk’s decision to banish the account, which he said threatened his family’s safety by tracking his movements.

None of the journalists’ tweets about @ElonJet, however, disclosed information about Musk or his jet’s location, despite Musk’s claim that the journalists had posted “assassination coordinates.”

The reporters maintain that their tweets were part of their reporting activities and didn’t violate any rules about “doxing,” the unsavory practice of posting personal information without permission. Accepting Musk’s demand for deletion, they say, would amount to a false admission of wrongdoing and an abdication to Musk’s subjective enforcement. They remain suspended.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Elon’s word is meaningless. It always has been and it always will be. I say that because this was always about Elon taking a shot at journalists that he didn’t like because they had the audacity to criticize him. That’s why I like many others are rubbing their hands in glee for the EU to simply lower the boom on this guy. Because when they do, as it’s only a matter of time until they do, Elon won’t know know what hit him. In the meantime, journalists are free to set up shop on Mastodon because a growing number of journalists have already moved over there. Not only that, a number of news organizations have set up their own Mastodon instances and federated them with the larger Mastodon community. That I hope creates a wave that brings larger news organizations and big name journalists to Mastodon. Which will in the end hurt Elon as that will take eyeballs away from Twitter. I guess he didn’t think that through. But he will be thinking about it when it happens.

It seems that more layoffs are happening at Twitter which is a sign that things are not going his way.

Additional Twitter employees were terminated Thursday as part of ongoing, rolling layoffs under new owner Elon Musk, including from the public policy and media and entertainment teams, according to tweets from affected employees. 

As part of Thursday’s layoffs, the members of Twitter’s public policy team who had remained following last month’s mass layoffs were again cut down by about half to around 15 employees, a former Twitter employee with knowledge of the layoffs told CNN. 

Among the public policy team’s responsibilities are working with outside advisory groups such as the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, which the company disbanded earlier this month. It also manages human rights programs to protect vulnerable users like activists, engages in transparency efforts, works with government agencies and helps to ensure compliance with global regulations. The public policy team had more than 60 employees prior to Musk’s takeover, the former employee said. 

Thursday’s exits come after Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce last month shortly after his takeover, and later pushed out additional employees, including through an ultimatum requiring them to work “hardcore” or exit the company. Musk’s team — seeking to cut costs at the struggling company that the billionaire purchased for $44 billion — has continued to lay off hundreds of additional Twitter staff since then, including top engineering and legal talent, according to the former employee and multiple recent reports.

On top of Elon being a Grade A scumbag for terminating people two days before Christmas, this is going to further erode Twitter’s ability to protect Twitter users and to make sure that they don’t run afoul of various laws around the planet. But Elon doesn’t care about any of that as it has been proven since he took over at Twitter. I guarantee that he will care at some point. And that day is coming.

Related to this, Elon brought in “Geohot” who is also known as George Hotz, Hotz is best known as the guy who performed a successful jailbreak on the Sony Playstation 3 and then promptly got sued by Sony because of that. He also once had a high-profile feud with Elon when he told a Bloomberg reporter that the Tesla founder “kept changing the terms” after tapping him for a job at Tesla. Hotz then went on to found a startup promising to outdo Tesla in self-driving technology but stepped down as its CEO at the end of October 2022. Elon recently hired him as an “intern” at Twitter to help him to fix the Twitter’s search and scrolling functions. But it looks like he’s now out. And he did it in a way that Elon would have done it.

Apparently he didn’t take this poll too seriously because this happened next:

He lasted four weeks at Twitter. Read into that what you will.

Related to this, both Hotz and Musk held an online chat on Twitter Spaces going over the drama facing the social media company and various related topics. I found a recording of this and pasted it in below:

Some notes if you’re a TL:DR sort of person:

• Elon elaborated on his recent decision-making claiming that Twitter is facing a financial crisis. “We have an emergency fire drill on our hands. That’s the reason. Not because I’m naturally capricious.”
• Elon said that the company is currently losing about $3 billion “in negative cash flow per year” under current conditions. “This company is basically like you’re in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” 
• Elon noted advertisers remain resistant to spending on Twitter due to the ongoing economic downturn.
• Elon claims that he company is starting to turn things around with the help of the new paid Twitter Blue subscription, he said.
• Elon said “I now think Twitter will in fact be okay next year,” he added. “I think we will be, hopefully, sort of roughly, cash flow break even. That’s what I expect for next year.”

Because this is a privately held company, there’s no way of verifying the truth of any of the above. But given that he continues to cost cut by downsizing people. I question the veracity of the statements that Elon made in this Twitter Space. But this along with more recent events that I have listed above shows that Twitter is in for more chaos. And that chaos will not be taking a break for the holidays.

Elon Musk is likely waking up to a major headache. And that headache is being caused by Germany who is’s calling for the EU to take direct action against Twitter:

A senior German official said on Thursday Twitter should join other tech firms in being directly monitored by the European Commission, saying the company’s erratic behaviour under new owner Elon Musk posed a threat to free speech. 

Sven Giegold, the state secretary in charge of competition policy at Germany’s economy ministry, pointed to Twitter’s abrupt suspension of journalists’ accounts and restrictions on the access to some links.

In a letter to two European Commissioners, Giegold called on the EU to launch an investigation and said the Commission should act to prevent what he called Twitter’s “anti-competitive behaviour”. 

Twitter and the EU did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

“General terms and conditions that change almost every hour, erratic justifications for extensive restrictions on links and the blocking of journalists threaten freedom of competition and pose a risk to freedom of expression, information and the press,” Giegold wrote on Twitter, while sharing his letter.

And Elon isn’t going to like this either:

German regulators are already pushing government institutions to stop posting announcements exclusively to privately-held platforms, touting alternatives like the fledgling decentralised social media network Mastodon. 

According to the Commission’s new regulations on digital markets, it will take over the supervision of large platforms such as Facebook and Google, Giegold said. 

“However, Twitter is not yet classified as a dominant digital platform, also because the company’s sales are still too low,” he said. “Nevertheless, Twitter exerts a great influence on shaping public opinion worldwide and also in Europe.”

The fact that the Germans are pushing Mastodon is significant. Germany is a big member of the EU bloc. And if they do something, others are likely to follow. And that will make Elon’s life even more miserable than it already is. Because that will drive eyeballs away from Twitter, and his behaviour will under much greater scrutiny by a bloc that has a history of lowering the boom on big companies. That’s not a place that I would want to be if I were Elon. But then, the only person to blame when it comes to Elon Musk being in this situation is Elon Musk.