No link, no image, and error messages in spades: this Monday, March 6, Twitter was affected for more than an hour by a major outage. The latest in a worrying series: in February, the service experienced four medium outages, compared to nine for the whole of 2022. These repeated malfunctions illustrate the crisis in which the company has been sinking since its takeover by Elon Musk in October.
“A small modification on the API [interface de programmation] had large-scale consequences”To explained shortly after Elon Muskthe CEO of the social network. ” The code [de Twitter] is very fragile, without being justified. Eventually it will have to be completely rewritten. » The “small modification” mentioned by Mr. Musk was the result of an engineer’s error, but for many commentators, it also and above all finds its origin in the waves of layoffs decided by Mr. Musk, who removed hundreds of positions in the social network’s engineering teams.
According to the information Platformer specialized mediathe company now has only one engineer in charge of site reliability, the “stability of the platform”, whose role is to control the changes made to Twitter to prevent them from having disastrous side effects. Large platforms – including Twitter until its takeover by Elon Musk – usually have entire teams, sometimes made up of several dozen engineers, to play this role. Other teams with a crucial technical role have seen their workforce melt since the takeover of the multi-billionaire at the end of 2022, raising fears of an increase in breakdowns in the months to come.
Disaffection of advertisers
Especially since Mr. Musk has just decided on new layoffs: on February 26, the New York Times revealed that the company had fired 200 additional employees, or approximately 10% of its workforce. Among them, engineers, but also salespeople and product managers working on the monetization of the platform, and claimed supporters of Elon Musk. Like Esther Crawford, the company’s product manager and one of the few company executives who greeted Mr. Musk’s arrival with enthusiasm, going so far as to post photographs showing her sleeping in her office to keep up the pace. imposed by the new boss.
To defend his action, however, Elon Musk said Tuesday, at a conference organized by Morgan Stanley, that the company could return to financial equilibrium in the second quarter. This accounting recovery would be more due to drastic budget cuts and massive layoffs than to an increase in income. These are down sharply: at the end of December, in an exchange on Twitter, Mr. Musk forecast a turnover of around 3 billion dollars (2.8 billion euros) in 2023, against 5 billion in 2021, a year in which the company had nevertheless lost 221 million dollars… However, the buyout added, on the expense side, $1.5 billion a year in interest repayments on the $13 billion loan taken out by the company. Without the massive cuts, the deficit could therefore have jumped to 3.5 billion dollars, Mr. Musk had justified at the time, estimating Twitter’s cash reserve at around one billion dollars.
On the income side, the problem is the disaffection of advertisers, 500 of whom have decided to no longer spend on the social network, according to the site The Information. However, advertising constitutes almost all of Twitter’s revenue, despite the recent launch of a paid subscription. The turnover is therefore down 40% over one year, confirmed documents published in January by Platformer. Brands are particularly put off by the policy of Elon Musk, who promised, in the name of freedom of expression, to moderate less and dismissed employees among the teams responsible for removing problematic, hateful or defamatory content. The European Commission is also pressing for Twitter to acquire sufficient means of moderation in the future, as will be required by the Digital Services Act regulation, which is scheduled to come into force in 2023.
Elon Musk’s impulsive temper directly affects how he runs the business
The return of advertisers is further complicated by the public image returned by Elon Musk. His impulsive temperament reflects directly on the way of running the business. Taken to task, on Twitter, by an Icelandic employee who explained that he did not know whether or not he was fired, Mr. Musk responded in a contemptuous manner, making fun of this ex-employee and his disability – muscular dystrophy. After a very aggressive exchange, which sparked a lot of outrage online, Mr. Musk ended up deleting some of his mocking tweets, before explaining that he had called his former employee to explain himself. “Sometimes it’s better to talk to people directly than to tweet”, recognised the man with 130 million subscribers on the platform.
On February 26, he had already aroused strong criticism by supporting the designer of the series Dilbert Scott Adams, accused of racist remarks towards the American black community. At the end of December 2022, under pressure from investors in his other companies, the leader of Tesla and SpaceX had been pushed to announce that he would not remain CEO of Twitter. But in mid-February, he specified in a conference in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) that his replacement would not arrive ” late “ in the year 2023, reported CNBC. It is necessary before that “stabilize” business, he explained.