Elon Musk decided that Twitter needed to have a few thousand fewer employees, and got to work in just a few months. But one of the obvious effects is related to the fact that there are increasingly cases where millions of users cannot use the network for several hours.

Between December and March, there were seven episodes, seven “outages” in which millions of people were unable to use Twitter for several hours, or critical elements of the app, such as the posting of “tweets,” were down.

There are no official data, but the press wrote that Twitter will have 80% fewer employees than before the company entered the “Elon Musk era.” Some international offices were eliminated, and many departments remained understaffed. Twitter has approximately 550 full-time engineers.

The Verge reported that the operational problems that appeared on Twitter on Monday and were resolved a few hours later began with the fact that only one technical engineer remained on an important project, and that engineer entered a configuration that contained errors. .

The situation shows that the large number of layoffs has affected all aspects of the company’s activities, especially since it is rare for a large company that is not threatened with bankruptcy to lay off 75-80% of its employees in less than six months.

And the Washington Post writes about Twitter’s “fragility” and that changes have been made to the programming and code, but any wrongly implemented change can “ground” Twitter for several hours.

In addition, among the affected teams was one that assessed the risks of launching new products or options. This team was disbanded, although it played an important role: before major changes to the program, it ran tests to predict what problems might arise.

Sources: Washington Post, The Verge