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Why Twitter will fail shortly
ZDNet ^ | 8 November 2022 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Posted on 11/10/2022 8:48:40 AM PST by ShadowAce

Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, and it appears he's already failing on his promise not to turn Twitter into a 'free-for-all hellscape.' But, I'm not here to talk about his policy blunders. That's a story for another day. No, I'm here to predict that Twitter, the site, will soon crash. And, once it fails, it won't be coming up for a while.

Also: Ditching Twitter? How to get started with Mastodon

Why? Simple. 

You can't lay off half of the staff of a cloud-based social network and expect things to keep running smoothly for Twitter's 450 million monthly active users. 

Indeed, Twitter accounts are already failing in odd ways. For example, Benjamin Dreyer, author of "Dreyer's English" and copy chief of Random House, found that the vast majority of replies to one of his tweets were vanishing into the aether. He wasn't the only one.

Even Musk appears to have realized that maybe firing every other person was a mistake. On Monday, November 7th, he tried to get workers, especially software engineers, to return. Good luck with that.

According to my Twitter sources and tweets on the site, they're not coming back. As Gergely Orosz, editor and author of the popular software engineering and management blog, The Pragmatic Engineer, said, "Several people who were let go on Friday, then asked to come back were given less than an hour as a deadline. Software engineers who got this call ... all said 'no' and the only ones who could eventually say 'yes' are on visas."

Managers, according to my sources and Orosz, are "getting desperate, trying to call back more people. People are saying 'no' + more sr engineers are quitting." 

Also: Elon Musk says Twitter usage is 'at all-time high LOL'

Orosz added, "None of this is surprising. As a rule of thumb, after you lay off X% of people, you get an additional half attrition. Lay off 10%: expect another 5% to quit. Lay off 50%... not unreasonable to expect another 25% to quit."

And, you can't expect to replace social network and cloud experts with Tesla embedded system engineers and get anything done. I'm a good technology and business writer, but no one in their right mind would hire me to write opera arias.

Let's look at Twitter's technology, shall we? Twitter runs on CentOS 7. This free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone comes to the end of its life at the end of June 2024. The leading choices for what to replace it with should be RHEL 9, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux. But instead of working on on that transition, what few system administrators Twitter has left are both trying to get the platform ready for Musk's laundry list of new features and keeping it patched and up-to-date. 

That's a problem. You see, unlike RHEL, where a big part of the attraction is that you can depend on Red Hat for first-rate support, CentOS, Rocky, and AlmaLinux are all primarily meant for companies with in-house staff who already know Linux servers backward and forward. That's no longer the case at Twitter. 

As Terra Field, a Honeycomb Staff Platform Engineer, pointed out, "An infrastructure the size of Twitter will not fail overnight, but it is going to relatively quickly go into a degraded state. The few platform people that remain will have their necks exactly at the waterline. It will not take much to sink." Field's right.

Also: How to delete your Twitter account

Twitter also relies on its own homebrew software. Programs such as Apache Heron for stream processing and twemproxy for cache scaling are essential for Twitter to run at scale. If programs like these go awry, and they will, Twitter's performance will slow down. 

That's probably not what Twitter wants to happen since the US elections are guaranteed to give the social network a serious stress test.Finally, there's the cloud. While Twitter relies a lot on in-house bare-metal for its Linux servers, it also needs cloud functionality to run as well. So, when it was leaked that Musk wanted to cut between $1.5 million and $3 million daily from servers and cloud services in his "Deep Cuts Plan," people worried.

They're worried with good reason. As Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill Group, explained, "Pursuing [a 50% cut] as the defined goal is courting disaster." That's because "a third of your bill is misconfigurations" doesn't scale, because someone notices! It's a variety of interconnected services, along with redundancy for systems, backups, etc. Very quickly, you're not cutting fat, but muscle and bone."

For example, if you delete the data warehouse, you probably haven't broken Twitter, but you no longer have reliable reporting. Another "significant spend source," Quinn remarked, "is observability. Turning all of that off will cut a giant portion of your bill -- but the next time Twitter goes down, there's a decent chance that it never comes back up again. You absolutely don't need backups until suddenly you very much do."

Sure, Quinn continued, "Twitter has also been around for ~15 years. [So,] a lot of infrastructure 'cruft' has built up. "Is that important, or can it be turned off" is the kind of thing best answered via asking people. 50% of Twitter was let go today, and your oral tradition just walked out the door too."

Besides the technical aspects, Quinn pointed out, from a business standpoint, Twitter has contracts with  "Google Cloud, AWS, and on-premise data centers. At this level of public spend, there are multi-year contracts in place guaranteeing certain spend levels; an awful lot of this is amortized over multiple years."

Put it all together, and it's not "if" Twitter will crash soon; it's "when." I won't be surprised if Election Day brings it down. If not, I give Twitter until the end of the month before its next major crash. 

And, when will it come back up? That's a darn good question. I won't be surprised if it takes days or even weeks. 

Replacing Twitter, and let's face it, that's what I predict most of us will end up doing, won't be easy. Ed Bott recently pointed out that there are no good Twitter replacements yet. He expects that unless Musk "actually burns down the data center housing Twitter's core assets, Twitter isn't going away." I fear that while Musk isn't throwing gasoline and lit matches at the servers, he's already destroying the people and software Twitter needs to run.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: elonmusk; mediawingofthednc; musk; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; ronklain; stevenvaughannichols; truthsocial; twitter; zdnet
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1 posted on 11/10/2022 8:48:40 AM PST by ShadowAce
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To: rdb3; JosephW; martin_fierro; Still Thinking; zeugma; Vinnie; ironman; Egon; raybbr; AFreeBird; ...

2 posted on 11/10/2022 8:48:54 AM PST by ShadowAce (Linux - The Ultimate Windows Service Pack )
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To: ShadowAce

🤔. Is this when the claim of a 7,000% (or 9,000%) increase in racis’/homophobic/anti Semitic comments occurs. Guess someone read it on the interweb so it must be true. 😵🐎💩


3 posted on 11/10/2022 8:53:59 AM PST by rktman (Destroy America from within? Check! WTH? Enlisted USN 1967 to end up with this? 😕)
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To: ShadowAce

I wonder how Steve feels about Twitter.


4 posted on 11/10/2022 8:55:51 AM PST by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer” )
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To: ShadowAce

(((YAWN))) We’re doomed again. What will we do without the TWITS on Twitter?


5 posted on 11/10/2022 9:00:29 AM PST by FlingWingFlyer (Congratulations RATS! Back to back steals.)
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To: ShadowAce

It’s not uncommon for billionaires to think developers are overpaid clerks and they don’t trust managers to tell them who is needed because the answer is always “all of them”. Slash and burn in the IT department is just going to end in disaster. Eventually, the site will just stop working.

Maybe that is his plan.


6 posted on 11/10/2022 9:01:36 AM PST by AppyPappy (Biden told Al Roker "America is back". Unfortunately, he meant back to the 1970's)
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To: blueunicorn6

I wonder how Steve feels about Twitter.

Also, does Steve currently have a vested interest with a Twitter competitor?


7 posted on 11/10/2022 9:02:38 AM PST by Grampa Dave (Vote Republican! They might not be perfect, but the other side is insane!)
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To: ShadowAce
You can't lay off half of the staff of a cloud-based social network and expect things to keep running smoothly for Twitter's 450 million monthly active users.

Sure you can when they don’t do anything all day.

He’s working on the naive presumption that all those twitter employees put in full 8 hour days actually doing something productive, something besides banning people they disagree with.

8 posted on 11/10/2022 9:06:03 AM PST by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith….)
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To: ShadowAce

Replace everything computer related in the above article with some government function from running the FDA to printing stamps, and you get the typical big-government mindset where all those useless paper-pushers are ‘essential’.


9 posted on 11/10/2022 9:06:44 AM PST by SpaceBar
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To: ShadowAce

I love reading these predictions of doom for twitter from ex employees and fanbois comign from the premise that Musk wants the company to stay the exact same company with the exact same business model and same corporate objectives.


10 posted on 11/10/2022 9:08:39 AM PST by jz638
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To: ShadowAce

Left wing thugs will deliberately destroy the site - with trolls, twisted laws, and democrat thuggery. Sabotage... Biden the buggy has already spoken of it.


11 posted on 11/10/2022 9:09:51 AM PST by GOPJ ( Networks need camera crews in black communities too. Watch turnout and comments. Harlem? Chicago? )
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To: AppyPappy
I think he'll get it figured out. He's got Tesla devs in there now and can always bring in a few SpaceX devs.


12 posted on 11/10/2022 9:11:40 AM PST by Pollard (Worm & GMO Free - some call us purebloods)
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To: Grampa Dave

If I were Elon, I would ban ‘Steve’ from Twitter.


13 posted on 11/10/2022 9:11:50 AM PST by silent majority rising
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To: ShadowAce

Also: Leftist fear and loathing


14 posted on 11/10/2022 9:13:36 AM PST by Pollard (Worm & GMO Free - some call us purebloods)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...
Don't worry, Joe's got this:

15 posted on 11/10/2022 9:13:39 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: ShadowAce
...Twitter's 450 million monthly active users.

Of which probably 300 million are bots. Prove me wrong.

16 posted on 11/10/2022 9:14:46 AM PST by JimRed (TERM LIMITS, NOW! Militia to the border! TRUTH is the new HATE SPEECH.)
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To: ShadowAce

Hyphenated beta male author lamenting the fall of his safe space.

Next!


17 posted on 11/10/2022 9:18:16 AM PST by ConservativeWarrior (Fall down seven times, stand up eight. - Japanese proverb)
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To: ShadowAce

Cloud services - most users of cloud services overpay.

They do this because up until lately there have been no good methods for determining how much (memory, compute, bandwidth)is needed to run a particular task. So, the default has been to provision more than is likely to be needed. However, new methods have lately emerged that allow an almost exact calculation of resources needed. From presentations I’ve seen, savings are usually in the 40%-60% range.


18 posted on 11/10/2022 9:21:26 AM PST by glorgau
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To: ShadowAce
Twitter will fail shortly

He says that like it's a bad thing.

19 posted on 11/10/2022 9:24:36 AM PST by Jeff Chandler (THE ISSUE IS NEVER THE ISSUE. THE REVOLUTION IS THE ISSUE.)
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To: ShadowAce
Put it all together, and it's not "if" Twitter will crash soon; it's "when." I won't be surprised if Election Day brings it down. If not, I give Twitter until the end of the month before its next major crash. And, when will it come back up? That's a darn good question. I won't be surprised if it takes days or even weeks.

Oh. Well, that didn't happen. I'm no fan of Twitter, even with Musk at the helm, but this guy's wishcasting is just retarded.

20 posted on 11/10/2022 9:31:42 AM PST by absalom01 (You should do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, and you should never wish to do less.)
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