But now stuff is breaking each week, and it's evident that maybe it wasn't the best idea.
Things continuing to work doesn't mean that firing 90% of the staff is a good idea. Decently built site will remain up even if nobody's around to take care of it.
Actually changing things is where you see an actual impact of the layoffs. There have been no major changes to the platform, only cosmetics, and they managed to fuck up every single one of them ("views" moved like six times and is still not aligned properly, black on black text, translating tweets is gone for weeks...).
I'm not the one to usually complain about UI changes, but for fuck's sake, every single week things are still the same functionality-wise, but something in the interface gets moved just because.
I've been trying to explain this to some of my Musk megafan acquaintances from when Musk was making lots of noise of about adding various "features", when they (the acquaintances) were fawning over "zomg look at the improvement in new product development since Elon took over!!11one".
As a Twitter addict, I can remember at least 5 times total outages within 2 years before Musk took over.
There are also some serious privacy accidents that surprisingly never got any attention in Western.
For example, about 3 years ago, Twitter bugged that everyone's private lists (titles, descriptions) are publicly visible for at least half a day. It was a huge shit storm in Japanese communities but I can't find any article mentioning it in English media.
Thanks for pointing out that privacy blunder. I hadn’t heard of that. It’s interesting that stories like that end up spreading in the east but not in the west.
How long were those 5 total outages? I wonder if this one will be average.
or nothing
Many tech companies are optimising for having hundreds of new features and products developing on top of the current stack, and allowing quick iterations, taking bets on things that might or might not have the market for it.
You can fire all civil engineers in the country and bridges will not collapse immediately. But you won't get any new bridges built. Also - at some point you might learn which ones had structural issues hidden by maintenance.
Search works half-ass-ly ("top" works, but not "live").
You can still read specific tweet or someone's profile.
Edit: they are, #TwitterDown is trending
This is selfish, but the worse Twitter burn, the less higher ups think of cheap out on software.
But since then it's been quite the shit-show from a stability point of view. I'm not a heavy user so I don't really care, but it is interesting how the initial pessimistic predictions had a sort of lag before being borne out.
