![]() ![]() ![]() Twitter engineers have designed fail-safes that the platform can fall back on so that the functionality doesn’t go totally offline but cut-down versions are provided instead. The juddering manual retweets and faltering follower counts are indications that this is already happening. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.” And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.” It starts with the small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.” Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. We’re accumulating technical debt much faster than before-almost as fast as we’re accumulating financial debt.” The list grows longer “If we’re going to be pushing at a breakneck pace, then things will break,” he says. That engineer doesn’t see a route out of the issue-other than reversing the layoffs (which the company has reportedly already attempted to roll back somewhat). The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.” “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs-a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. ![]() Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. This is particularly problematic, says Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running. Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts-in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “ Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. “Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. ![]()
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