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.