Elon Musk was warned by Twitter engineer Sheon Han, who deleted an initial tweet criticizing Musk’s decision to delete “microservices bloatware.” While cutting bloat may sound like a worthwhile goal, coders and Twitter employees voiced their concerns that turning off these microservices would lead to unintended consequences. Sheon Han tweeted: “As a Twitter engineer working on a number of those microservices, I’m predicting a massive outage in the next few days if 80 percent are turned down.”
They were, it appears, correct to have concerns. It’s unclear what of this “bloatware” was altered during the day, but users began to report that, after logging out, they were unable to log back in again. The problem affected users who have set up two-factor authentication, an extra step at login to make your account more secure. Users (who are also greeted with the two-factor authentication check when changing other Twitter settings) reported that they were not sent a code, making them unable to log in.
One of the problems that Musk faces is a human one, specifically that he has fired a lot of them. The remaining staff is likely in for a grueling time, especially as Musk has asked them to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” or leave the company with severance.
“Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality,” one Twitter engineer told MIT Review, citing odd notifications and unusual-looking retweets that users have reported since the takeover, “and we’re already kind of seeing this.”
The engineer warned that big problems could happen when large volumes of traffic hit the site, such as during large news events. When you have a diminished site reliability team and the focus is shifted to new features, this could be when bigger breaks might happen. The breaks will accumulate, according to the engineer, until eventually, the site becomes “unusable.”
The warning, which has been widely shared, has not affected Musk’s plan to push ahead with new features, such as the reintroduction of his briefly suspended Twitter Blue Verification scheme, nor his willingness to let employees of the firm who know the site inside-out leave the team.