Elon Musk reveals the ‘largest disaster’ he’s confronted in his 6 months as Twitter CEO

But, six months into his tenure as Twitter’s head, Musk stated the “largest disaster” he confronted got here after shutting down one of many firm’s information facilities.

“Shutting down one in all our server facilities was fairly troublesome,” Musk informed the BBC’s James Clayton on Wednesday, in an prolonged interview that was additionally livestreamed on Twitter Spaces.

“I assumed the server facilities have been redundant, however…in truth quite a lot of issues have been hard-coded to this one server middle, and so after we shut it down, it was fairly catastrophic,” he stated. “We misplaced quite a lot of performance, and we actually rushed to place it again.”

Musk stated the shutdown occurred “round late December, early January” with out offering specifics. 

In late December, Musk tweeted that he’d “disconnected one of many extra delicate server racks.” Twitter suffered a extreme outage a couple of days later, with customers reporting error messages, clean pages, and different bugs. 

Later hiccups

The social media platform has had a number of hiccups since then. 

In February, Twitter customers reported being unable to ship messages, with the platform telling them that they’d exceeded a “every day restrict” for tweets. The outage was reportedly attributable to an worker by accident deleting inner recordsdata that ruled how a lot customers may publish.

Then, in March, customers have been briefly unable to click on on exterior hyperlinks on the platform, getting an error message as an alternative. Twitter blamed the outage on “an inner change that had some unintended penalties,” whereas Musk called the platform “brittle.”

Twitter, which not has a communications division, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark made outdoors U.S. enterprise hours.

Musk stated that the “ache stage has been extraordinarily excessive” in working Twitter, with “actually fairly a aggravating scenario during the last a number of months.” He known as the choice to put off hundreds of Twitter workers “one of many hardest issues” he needed to do as CEO. (Laid-off Twitter workers have complained concerning the lack of communication round job cuts, in addition to late and smaller-than-expected severance funds, and Musk has even argued with laid-off workers on the social media platform.) 

But Musk defended his determination to purchase Twitter when requested about regrets, saying that whereas “there’s a bunch of selections that would have been made higher, all’s effectively that ends effectively.”