• Elon Musk says that he will be staying at Twitter’s headquarters until the organisation is fixed.
• Meanwhile, firing hordes of engineers and turning off microservices has caused numerous issues for a large portion of users.
• Fears are rising that the platform is vulnerable to outages and breakdowns.

There is staying late at the office and then there is using the office as your home away from home.

This week newly minted owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, took to his platform to brag about the fact that he had been at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco “all night”. The billionaire took this a step further saying that he would be working and staying at the office until the organisation was fixed.

While this might be because the problems at Twitter continue to pile up, it could also be that the billionaire currently doesn’t have a home and lives on the couches of friends.

The billionaire should find a comfy spot though as the problems persist.

The latest appears to be with Twitter’s microservices. Microservices, as explained by AWS, are “small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs”. Essentially, they allow processes in huge architectures to run more efficiently and allow for agile development.

But Musk sees these microservices as “bloatware” and as such, turned 80 percent of them off. Since this tweet below, some Twitter users have said that multi-factor authentication no longer works.

Welp, I can’t even download my data from Twitter because it requires 2FA.

It says I hit the “limit” on my first try. Musk broke it because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and had some microservices (that enable 2FA) deactivated.

The slow-moving train wreck continues… pic.twitter.com/Q9xvLo3AXW

— Michael (@mightiestpen) November 15, 2022

This comes after the very public firing of Eric Frohnhoefer. The Twitter for Android engineer took Musk to task at the weekend after a claim that more than 1 000 poorly batched remote procedure calls were causing slow loading times in other countries.

While the engineer did outline that it’s one of the problems – just not the problem – Musk then responded yesterday that the fact that Frohnhoefer didn’t know about 1 200 microservices run when using the app “not great”.

Then in response to another user Musk announced Frohnhoefer was fired.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592186302379982849

One other engineer, Ben Leib, was also fired at the weekend after quote retweeting Musk’s RPC claim and stating, “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”

Lieb confirmed to Bloomberg on Sunday that he had since been fired.

Of course, taking your boss to task on a public platform is not the best idea but when internal communication has seemingly disappeared, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Many have pointed to the mass exodus and firing of staff as the reason technical issues keep popping up and there are fears that the platform could collapse without the engineers who understood it so intricately.

While we don’t know what is causing the numerous problems at Twitter, if Musk intends on living at the office, he may want to start making decisions that fix things and don’t break them further or get comfortable on the office couch.

[Image – CC BY 2.0 Mike Davis]