Twitter’s Slow and Painful End
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suggestion that he might run the platform into the ground was, for many, including me, a shorthand. Many supposed that Musk would roll back key moderation policies or reinstate some banned accounts, or that his ownership would be some kind of anti-woke Bat-Signal, flooding the platform with people who are attracted to social media for its capacity to alienate people.
Instead, less than a month into Musk’s tenure, he seems to be doing everything in his power to throw a wrench in the gears of Twitter’s infrastructure. As some Twitter insiders predicted, Musk has drastically and indiscriminately cut engineering staff with crucial institutional knowledge and gutted teams that deal with Twitter’s complex legal and privacy policies and their enforcement. He’s also frozen code deployment and has pledged to disconnect Twitter’s microservices, which are part of the website’s technical architecture, but which Musk sees as costly bloat. Anecdotally, users across the world—and specifically outside the United States—are reporting all kinds of abnormalities and glitches in the way tweets load. Since Musk’s layoffs started, current and former Twitter engineers have publicly and privately expressed concern that the world’s richest man is making decisions that could cause Twitter to structurally decay and go offline during peak moments.
In recent days, I’ve had conversations with three former Twitter employees, yesterday. (“We will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk reportedly wrote to staffers. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” If that promise somehow fails to entice, workers can opt for three months’ severance instead.)
