As I understand it, it's likely because he didn't pay his server bills to Google. and wasn't able to migrate enough stuff off in time. Maybe he thought that like the dudes he's renting buildings from, he could just not pay and they'd wait. The difference of course being that, Google can repurpose those servers within a few days. Those buildings might remain empty for months.
Are we still entertaining the notion that the man isn't deliberately destroying Twitter? Because it definitely seems conscious and purposeful, and has for a while now IMO.
My theory is that Reddit and twitter are being deliberately killed because they are too good at letting the proletariat self-organize. They don’t want an Arab Spring of the west.
I'm not convinced that part of that wasn't bots trying to hamper productive discussion. They were rampant before, but the amount of bots had gotten ridiculous over the last year or so.
People talk a lot of insurrection but it’s very easy to sit on your ass and say “fuck the establishment” and feel like you’re doing something. When in fact, the platform is the very opiate that stops people from doing anything worthwhile
"Mortimer, I bet this little pig boy nerd can run a social media giant into the ground in 1 month."
"Well, I think that's only possible with a rich tech snob at the helm, and even then it would take him 6 months!"
"The usual bet?"
"$1"
I’m on Twitter to follow some pro-labor activists, and the pro-labor activists are on Twitter because that’s where people who most need to see labor actions are. The Fediverse is good if your audience is tech-educated, or if your audience is specific friends and you all switched at once. Retail workers who just had a problem with wage theft and need some advice are probably posting to Twitter and they’re certainly not going to go through learning what the Fediverse is and how to sign up for it on top of stressing about the wage theft.
People fail to understand that large projects have inertia. He could have shuttered all twitter offices, fired all employees, and only paid the server bills, and the website would probably continue to function just fine for a few months.
But as a devops/SRE, this whole saga has been awesome to watch
As a way-too seasoned web developer who appreciates working alongside great SREs, this has been pretty interesting. I'm honestly surprised more hasn't gone wrong but maybe that's yet to come. Since they are (I imagine) losing users instead of growing it might actually avoid running into future scaling issues that were looming.
And often the tipping point is invisible. Some small routine or service degrades, but outwardly everything still works fine... there is just more strain on the services and clients that use that service, causing them to slowly degrade over the next few hours, days, or weeks, which in turn puts more strain on the services that call those services... etc etc.
Until one day the system is so degraded major things start breaking. It seems like it came out of nowhere, but the initial failure happened weeks ago and has been cascading since then.
Once a system hits that point it's often not enough to just fix the initial problem because so much of the ecosystem around it has been thrown out of whack.
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