After Elon Musk bought Twitter last
year and eliminated thousands of its employees, many users were so alarmed by
the cuts that #RIPTwitter and #GoodbyeTwitter began trending.
اضافة اعلان
The social media service remains
operational today. But its outages, bugs, and other glitches are increasingly
piling up.
In February alone, Twitter experienced at
least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to
NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the
frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that
have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for
instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.
Twitter’s reliability has deteriorated as
Musk has repeatedly slashed the company’s workforce. After another round of
layoffs on Saturday, Twitter has fewer than 2,000 employees, down from 7,500
when Musk took over in October. The latest cuts affected dozens of engineers
responsible for keeping the site online, three current and former employees
said.
The technology challenges add to Musk’s
issues at Twitter. The company is trying to lure back advertisers, even as Musk
has waded into scandals, most recently by defending “Dilbert” creator Scott
Adams after the cartoonist made racist comments. And Twitter is under scrutiny
for a rise in hate speech and its treatment of workers.
“It used to be that you’d see smaller things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of the world… When serious things break, the people who knew the systems aren’t there anymore.”
Twitter is unlikely to go kaput, but its
technology operations have become more precarious since November, seven current
and former employees said. Musk has ended operations at one of Twitter’s three
main data centers, further slashed the teams that work on the company’s
back-end technology such as servers and cloud storage, and gotten rid of
leaders overseeing that area.
Who will solve future problems?The moves have exacerbated fears that there
are not enough people or institutional knowledge to triage Twitter’s problems,
especially if the service one day encounters a problem its remaining workers do
not know how to fix, two people with knowledge of the company’s internal
operations said.
In the past, Twitter prevented breakages
from escalating by having people around to diagnose and solve problems
immediately. Now the platform is likely to be plagued by more glitches as
workers take longer to pinpoint issues, the people said.
“It used to be that you’d see smaller
things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of
the world,” said Saagar Jha, a Twitter engineer who left in May. “When serious
things break, the people who knew the systems aren’t there anymore.”
Twitter and Musk did not respond to
requests for comment.
The ‘Fail Whale’ is still flyingIn an email to employees on Monday, which
was seen by the New York Times, Musk said the layoffs over the weekend were “a
difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution”. He
said those still at the company would receive “very significant stock and other
compensation awards” on March 24.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Twitter
was known for regular failures and its “Fail Whale”, an image of a whale being
airlifted by a flock of birds that appeared when the site did not function.
Over the years, the company added hundreds of people to its infrastructure
teams and improved its server technology to mitigate outages, three current and
former engineers said.
After Musk took over the company, the
layoffs started — followed by more substantive changes to the back-end
technology. On December 24, Twitter shuttered a data center in Sacramento,
California, which had helped handle much of the web traffic to the service.
That left Twitter with only two other facilities, in Atlanta and Portland,
Oregon.
Four days later, Twitter experienced a widespread
outage, with some users logged out of the service or unable to view replies to
their tweets.
Employee errors led to other outages. In
early February, a Twitter worker deleted data from an internal service meant to
prevent spam, leading to a glitch that left many people unable to tweet or to
message one another, according to three people familiar with the incident.
Musk said the layoffs over the weekend were “a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution”
Twitter’s engineers took several hours to
diagnose the problem and restore the data with a backup. In that time, users
received error messages that said they could not tweet because they had already
posted too much. The Platformer newsletter earlier reported the cause of the
problem.
A week later, an engineer testing a change
to people’s Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices caused another temporary
outage. The engineer disregarded a past practice of testing new features on
small subsets of users and simply rolled out the change — a tweak for Spaces,
Twitter’s live audio service — to a wide swath of users, two people familiar
with the move said.
“Welp, I just accidentally took down
Twitter,” Leah Culver, the engineer, later tweeted. The app eventually came
back online after the change was reversed, she said. Culver did not respond to
a request for comment.
Lags and unexplained ‘like’ lossesAs Musk has changed Twitter with new
features, “more rough edges” have appeared on the site, said Jane Manchun Wong,
an independent software engineer who studies social apps.
In February, Wong tweeted that the number
of likes had dropped on a tweet of hers, catching Musk’s attention. He replied
that there was a “synchronization lag”, or a delay in distributing Twitter’s
data between its storage centers.
Some users have also complained that their
number of followers on Twitter appears to have fallen mysteriously. Others have
observed that tweets from users they had blocked — including Musk — began
appearing in their feeds with no explanation.
“When there are back-end changes, sometimes
things break,” Wong said.
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