I honestly think the engineering/ops problems are the least of their failures. They bled revenue not because of outages, but because wild policy swings and chaotic management style alienated some of their biggest customers.
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.
> 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.
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.
The frequency and types of outages and failures is significantly more frequent now than pre-Elon. This isn't a surprise to anyone, given Elon's strategy for maintaining Twitter (or not maintaining it, as the case may be).
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.
>What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon?
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.
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.