Elon Musk Is Still Doing Things That An Engineer For Twitter Says Will Break Twitter

Twitter Blue has once again been announced by Elon Musk, who tweeted that he was “pushing back the relaunch of Blue Verified until November 29th to ensure that it is rock solid.” However, engineers and developers from Twitter and elsewhere have expressed their concern that the platform could start to creak and fail in the coming months while his smaller team works on the project, which opponents say could cause impersonation difficulties on the platform.

Sheon Han, a Twitter employee, warned Musk after Musk decided to erase “microservices bloatware” on the grounds that “less than 20% are genuinely needed for Twitter to run.” As a Twitter engineer working on several of those microservices, Han—who later deleted a tweet opposing the decision—quote-tweeted their employer to say, “I’m forecasting a catastrophic outage in the next few days if 80 percent are turned down.”

Sure enough, later that day users with two-factor authentication for added account security discovered that they could not enter into their accounts because the system would not issue them a code, whether it was as a direct result of the downtime or due to other portions of code in need of an urgent patch.

All of which is to say, when your engineers offer you an urgent warning, you should probably pay attention to them. Such a warning was given to MIT Technology Review by an engineer who claimed that Twitter was already showing signs of a slow collapse.

Site reliability engineer Ben Krueger told MIT Technology Review that while “the larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, the largest risk is the tiny things starting to degrade.” These are extremely large and intricate systems.

One of the issues Musk has is a human one, namely the fact that he has let many people go. The remaining employees are probably in for a challenging period, especially because Musk has demanded that they either agree to work “long hours at high intensity” or receive severance pay.

One Twitter employee told MIT Review that “round-the-clock is damaging to quality” and that “we’re already kind of seeing this” in the strange alerts and strange-looking retweets that users have complained since the takeover.

The engineer forewarned that when heavy traffic loads hit the site, as they do during significant news events, serious issues could arise. Larger breaks may occur when your site reliability team is understaffed and your attention is diverted to new features. The engineer predicted that when the breaks increase, the facility will eventually become “unusable.”

The well publicized warning hasn’t stopped Musk from moving through with new features, like the reinstatement of his short suspended Twitter Blue Verification program, or from being ready to let staff members who are intimately familiar with the platform go.