Single Engineer, Single Stroke: How One Person Brought Down Twitter
Figure 1. How a single engineer brought down Twitter (Schiffer, 2023). Retrieved from www.theverge.com
On Monday, March 7th, 2023, the world was shocked to learn that a single engineer had caused an outage on Twitter. This incident has raised questions about how such an event could have occurred and what it means for the future of the platform.
The outage was caused by an engineer who had been working on a major project involving the platform's API. The engineer had been tasked with making changes to the API that would improve its performance and reliability. Unfortunately, due to a lack of oversight and communication between teams, the changes made by the engineer resulted in an unexpected shutdown of Twitter's services.
This incident has highlighted some serious issues within Twitter's engineering team. It appears that there were not enough engineers working on this project and that communication between teams was lacking. This led to a situation where one person was responsible for making changes that could have far-reaching consequences without anyone else being aware of them.
Figure 2. More Twitter Staffers Axed Over Weekend; Elon Musk Tweets, “Hope You Have A Good Sunday. First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life” (Goldsmith, 2023). Retrieved from www.deadline.com
The incident also raises questions about Elon Musk's decision to lay off half of his 7,500 employees at Twitter earlier this year. With so few engineers left at the company, it is possible that this incident could have been avoided if more resources had been available.
It is clear that this incident highlights some serious issues within Twitter's engineering team and raises questions about how such events can be prevented in the future. It is essential for companies like Twitter to ensure they have adequate resources and processes in place to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
Sources
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down
https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng