For someone who has tried to avoid hearing as much as possible about this drama (and didn't notice this was about Twitter until looking at the comments), what are the condensed "lesson learned" takeaways if you don't mind elaborating?
If they had frozen features and left the existing policies in tact, I suspect we would have a dramatically different narrative about the layoffs. If brief interruptions like this are the worst that happens when you cut engineering to the bone, it's a good argument that is Twitter was indeed wildly overstaffed.
Instead, though, we have a company in crisis due to its mismanagement of other areas, so we're primed to view stuff like this through the lens of that broader failure.
Overstaffed in order to maintain Twitter as a static service that never ships new things, sure.
I guess they've been able to ship some things that the old Twitter had already implemented and/or a/b tested. But I'm not sure those count. Meanwhile people have been paying in advance for Twitter Blue features that were promised 3 months ago.
What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon?
I really don't see the reason for this artificial drama. Do other "X service is down" threads go this way?
People say Elon is dramatic, but this thread is honestly ridiculous and way more dramatic than anything I've seen him post.
I don't interpret a lot of "drama" as you put it, but interest. Many observers here are in this field, and follow the "chaos engineering" discipline. Some of them use tools like "chaos monkey" that simulates a metaphorical monkey running through your server room turning off random things, to see how well your resilience systems cope. It's a rare and greatly interesting sight to such practitioners to get to see what happens when the monkey "disconnecting the more sensitive server racks" is a more literal one.
To use a tennis metaphor, good players minimize unforced errors and recover quickly from forced errors.
This is a very clear unforced error that could likely have been prevented by just waiting to roll out the new feature.
To extend the tennis metaphor, it would be like Serena Williams losing a set on 50 double faults. Sure, she's lost other sets before, but it would be notable for her to lose in such a unique way, even if she still went on to win the match.
That's why people are talking about this, it's a very weird way for a site to fail and it's interesting how it happened.
Musk's cost-cutting may yet pan out from a business perspective, but it seems to be a pretty risky move.
Before, it was "healthy for everyone" when Twitter went down (search hn.algolia.com for pre-Elon Twitter downtime threads)
Now it's an episode of Real Housewives just like any other Elon thread on HN.
Perhaps the takeaway is that we should get our shit together. The opposite of r/antiwork.
No need to pull out terms like gaslighting to justify creating more drama.
A 1 hour downtime is nothing.
If it’s nothing, why is Musk on Twitter saying the whole codebase is brittle for no reason, and needs a complete rewrite? Sounds like a pretty big deal to me.
As far as the drama comment, you’re free to disengage from this thread at any time. No need to continually interject how against the drama you are. Just leave if you find it distasteful.
Brittle code means it's hard to change, and causes issues when changed, but other than that it's stable when running.
And I have every right to point out the drama here. People here do somewhat have the right to create drama, but it is distasteful and unprofessional and I will continue to call it out.
Glad for you to admit there is drama here though :)
I'm probably not the ideal person to write this down, there was so much stuff going on, some people probably made a whole blog-article series on this. This is just a few of the things that I'm able to remember right now.. and with everything on hn here it gives you some ideas and things to think about. Hope that Helps.