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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

The management is worried about internal sabotage?

My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.

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Wow. There was a tweet recently that the engineers of the core critical systems have left. Twitter is just basically coasting around.

What a sudden turn of events and destruction of this magnitude.

Personally, I believe that the crash and burn of Twitter and the rise of a better SM in its place has very low probability, but one can hope.

It makes me wonder how much “infrastructure runway” a company like Twitter has. If every engineer resigns, how long will it take before the infrastructure stops working autonomously… server/DB hard drives fill up or crash, PSUs die, high maintenance processes grind to a haunt, network capacity stops scaling, etc.

I think we're going to find out in the next few days, but if you believe this graph the signs are not encouraging (NB: this appears to be self-reported outages so I'm not sure that it is trustworthy):

https://downdetector.co.uk/status/twitter/

I thought this graph is just a visitor counter for the page?

the reports are up > 20x from baseline, twitter traffic is nowhere close to that multiple

My guess is a few weeks if that. However, the World Cup is starting this weekend, and Twitter will see heavy traffic spikes. I assume in the chaos that has been the last month they’ve failed to properly account for this. Maybe I’m wrong, but if Twitter holds up through this weekend it’ll be a clear sign they had way too many employees.

I remember getting into Sangria (Scala's GraphQL implementation) for the first time a couple years ago and seeing Twitter devs helping contribute to the lib. Was excited to see Twitter push that envelope. Now sad to see it all go away.

Twitter is one the few Scala shops around, would be sad to lose it.

The Scala community is so small that I know the names of almost all of the top engineers many of whom worked at Twitter.

The idea that they are just going to find dozens of them is hilariously insane.

They should hire @jdegoes to save Twitter from the heresy of their Java++ ways.

Imagine him and Elon in a room. Their combined egos would create a singularity and we'd all die.

Shameless plug but Morgan Stanley FID tech does some pretty unique and advanced work on Scala (Optimus).

There's reports the NOC and SREs have all left as well.

Surely an outage is right around the corner.

The first deployment from a newly hired SRE with no old heads to explain all the undocumented sharp edges.

Oh boy.

Even better, how the fuck do you triage a system you've never touched before, that most likely is overengineered to hell and back, while the guys responsible for getting you splunk creds are still trying to find out who can give them THEIR creds to get in themselves.

I feel like it might be fun, honestly. I love a good murder mystery. I wonder if they'll pay Netflix money when things start falling down.

World Cup starts on the 20th. We'll see what happens then.

Don't even need to wait until then. Apparently the entire payroll team has quit.

Surely more resignations are coming.

Well, if your systems are managed well they shouldn't just fall apart in a week without ops, but Murphy's a bitch

>Surely an outage is right around the corner.

Hahahahahaha

>Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.

When I first heard about twitter I thought 1) that’s a dumb idea and 2) it won’t last long.

I was of course very wrong about #2 but feel increasingly right about #1 the more time goes by and the more (IMO) it provides net harm to society and social discourse.

So I’m sympathetic to the employees stuck there but hoping my timeline for #2 was simply way off and it finally goes away.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will take its place, and I personally would bet that it will suck even worse.

FTX had like 20 employees, how many could Twitter possibly need? /s

It definitely feels like internal sabotage at the moment...

How is abandoning a mad boss sabotage? Those people are my new heroes. They clearly send a message to anyone in the industry trying to emulate musk, that if you mess around you find out.

I read it as Musk sabotaging it himself.

That would be how I meant it.

If that’s what you meant, then I think a clearer wording would have been “self-sabotage”. The wording “internal sabotage” implies a coordinated effort against Musk by people inside Twitter.

By whom, Musk?

Because while particular actions he's taken in the past few weeks may be justifiable in certain contexts, all of them taken together can only be interpreted as an attempt to set 44 billion dollars on fire.

Yeah, I meant internal sabotage by Musk.

Weird new CEO fires half the company, then demands a _loyalty pledge_, like a common Henry VIII. Sensibly, everyone quits. I mean, the only saboteur there is the leadership.

Weird how twitter is running just fine huh

I think any reasonably well engineered system of this scale should run fine for a few weeks without ops, barring any weird Murphy's Law madness. Staying up for two days is not much of an achievement. Perhaps the real test is still ongoing.

It appears I wasn't paritually clear. I meant Elon Musk is the one commiting internal sabotage.

So is this ignorance or malice?

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