Twitter troubles have ‘doubled’ under Musk

Figures suggest cuts and large-scale layoffs inflicted in the past few months are taking their toll on the company’s operations.

Elon Musk has said Twitter is losing $US3bn a year. Picture: AFP

The number of problems affecting Twitter has more than doubled under Elon Musk’s ownership, ­according to data from an organisation that monitors internet ­performance.

ThousandEyes noted that since the takeover, the site had been slower than usual and content did not load. The figures suggest that financial cuts and large-scale lay-offs inflicted on the platform in the past few months are taking their toll on the company’s operations.

When Mr Musk bought the ­social media business in October last year for $US44bn, he immediately laid off half the workforce.

From last December to the end of February, there had been 208 instances of poor performance at the business compared with 100 across the same period a year earlier, according to ThousandEyes.

The numbers relate to “application performance degradation”, which looks at how the site is able to complete certain functions in a normal time span.

ThousandEyes, which is backed by Cisco, said most of the incidents were brief or affected a limited part of the service. However, on March 6 Twitter experienced its severest outage, with error messages flashing up when users clicked on to external links embedded in tweets.

According to the Twitter support team, it was the result of “an internal change that had some unintended consequences”. This led to more than 38,000 reports in the US to Downdetector, a company that monitors website out­ages in real time. Mr Musk expressed his frustration in a tweet: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.”

In December, Mr Musk described Twitter as a “plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed” after revealing that the company was losing $US3bn a year. Twitter spent $US1.5bn servicing its debt.

Christopher Budd, a threat research manager from Sophos, a cybersecurity company, said: “During the recent outage, only one engineer left in the team had the capabilities to fix it due to the mass exodus of Twitter technical staff. Twitter’s security situation is dangling on a thread.”

Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at Enders, said Twitter’s cuts were being closely scrutinised for their impact: “The big public tech companies … want to know: how deeply can you cut without damaging the core product? At minimum, outages at Twitter suggest that firing two-thirds of your staff in a matter of months maybe comes with some negative side effects.”

He added that other failures degraded user experience. “In April last year, Musk promised, ‘If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!’ Which sounds like a bad joke to Twitter users, given the proliferation of spam since the takeover. Musk has neither defeated the spam bots, nor yet died trying.”

When contacted for comment, the Twitter press office sent a poo emoji.

The Times