1. The site would crash and burn the next day.
2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around.
3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various system quirks was gone.
We are now seeing #3 play out in front of us.
#2 is what hardcore Elon fans said.
#3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...
Those numbers have been proven to be incorrect, by people who are posting from locked accounts with 0 followers racking up large nonzero view counts within a few minutes.
It'll have one, maybe two more reads every time you look. Not dozens. One person posted an example that had literally over a hundred alleged "views" within a minute, despite not refreshing their timeline after posting the tweet.
You're talking about a man who has more than once been fined by the SEC for making false statements about public securities. What makes you think that he'd be a more reliable narrator for a private company for which he has no external accountability and a large personal financial interest?
Record engagement these days is most likely measured in single digit percentage points over average engagement (at most maybe 10-20%), where when you're early and your traffic is spiking, it can be an order of magnitude more traffic than what you're used to seeing. The absolute numbers are larger yes, but from the perspective of "what can my infrastructure / architecture handle", relative changes are far more relevant.
My recollection is that around ~2011 a day without a fail whale was the odd one out.
There's a great 2015 essay by Peter Seibel who was tech lead on their Engineering Effectiveness team:
https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers
I'd guess almost nobody from that era remains at Musk-Twitter.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
The fact that things start to fail after that infrastructure has been put on place and running find for a while is noteworthy.
Maybe it's because I use an Android, but I've always found the experience terrible. I get notifications, but when I click them and they don't take me anywhere; the back button is completely broken; mentions randomly don't produce any alerts; it resets me to the algorithmic timeline every few days; replies often fail to load; the spam problem is completely out of control and most adverts are irrelevant crypto-spam; search never finds what I wanted; it's constantly putting tweets on my timeline from people I don't follow; and the whole app seems optimised to produce as much hatred and outrage as possible. Nowhere on the planet is as toxic as a Twitter thread, and yet the media and political sphere collectively decided that reporting on and catering to Twitter spats is the most important aspect of their career.
Frankly, if Musk destroys Twitter, it might be the best thing he could do for society. I may be misremembering, but I thought that prior to Musk buying Twitter, everyone was decrying it as toxic and lots of people were suggesting the government should step in to reduce its influence. Now it seems to be imploding by itself, yet everyone's upset.
What will sink Twitter is not %99.8 uptime. It's those network effects fading away.
For example, if people stopped using MySpace, Facebook, etc it was not because of their availability.
Again, I'm not saying this is cool. Im just saying if that extra %0.2 downtime (in short term) costs you 80% of your work force costs, a business manager may consider that acceptable.
Well we're not even a year in and these "small issues" seem to be repeatedly occurring. Let's get a little further out with some more stability before we call them justifiable lol
Elon Musk has a rock-solid reputation of paying his bills, after all.
Not by bringing people in during a fire and pointing into the smoke and saying "fix that!"
I'm sure there are some people who would do that, but those opportunities become very expensive-to-impossible when you burn bridges the way certain new management has. People hold personal value on things like respect and principle that can make them behave "irrationally" in naive analyses like this.
What you're describing is the loss of institutional knowledge with a fantasy tacked on the side.
1) There's no reason to expect those employees would come back, even at rates far higher than Musk is likely willing to pay. Everything indicates Musk has destroyed a lot of goodwill with his shambolic layoffs, and getting people to come back is one of the situations where you need goodwill.
You're basically talking about gig-work on a shitty boss's terms. Only desperate people would play that game, and the people Musk would need probably aren't the desperate ones.
2) Any employees that come back are going to be rusty and lack the institutional of what happened after they left, so their effectiveness at immediate fire-fighting will be greatly reduced.
3) If there's a "massive catastrophe" at Twitter, do you think they even know who to call back? I wouldn't be surprised if they've lost a lot of the institutional knowledge about who knew what, at this point.
It's possible Twitter didn't need to be spending all the money they were to be maintaining five nines or whatever, given the shift in product focus (humans and not a general/universal message bus - bots can't @-mention anymore, etc).
Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where. I doubt people will abandon the platform en masse over a few minutes of downtime here and there. They will lose 100% of users and be down forever if they don't stop the bleeding, however.
Twitter will never get to $44bn market cap again (much less a valuation with a decent IRR) by cutting costs alone. They need to grow way more than they need to cut costs.
If any of those experiments lead to less growth (which I’d argue is true of a broken Tweetdeck), then they are wholly not worth it.
It was arguably even a fair price when he offered it (acquisition always have premiums), the market just turned.
But now $44bn is the cost basis for all the current shareholders, so Elon has to make returns against that.
It could be because Twitter was ascendant at the time as you described.
... wait, they absolutely were, though? I remember at the time people saying that Twitter was doomed for this very reason, by analogy to Friendster, an early MySpace-ish/Facebook-ish thing which was never able to stay up.
It was a pretty common belief at the time that unreliable Twitter would be replaced by Pownce/Google Buzz/something entirely different.
A revenue collapse of 40% with a surge in fake verified profiles does not make Twitter better than ever. It is crazy to see a sudden sharp 40% revenue decline being described as better than ever.
And this thing he was complaining about back in May, he completely f'd it up post-purchase:
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-fix-twitter-feed-elon-musk/