Australia and NZ experienced a 16h outage last week.
Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no.
Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no.
And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?
A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.
Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.
You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.
Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.
This is dire for him.
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most
I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.
I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.
And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.
As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.
So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.
I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
I can assume one of the primary reasons for cutting staff and offices is to reduce costs and hopefully get cash flow positive asap even if it’s $1 positive. That puts him in a better position to stop incurring debt.
Companies months from bankruptcy don’t get to take a higher valuation in a down market: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/03/elon-musks-space...
That means that it should be judged like a startup. Did it demonstrate a market? If so, it's valuable, if not, it's not. Current cash flow isn't very relevant.
At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.
Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.
Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d...
Amusing comments over there from readers.
You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.
Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.
After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.
The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.
The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.
By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.
Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.
So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.
The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.
Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.
Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.
Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.
No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.
It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.