Is Twitter shutting down? Engineer warns of outage if Elon Musk turns off microservices

The Elon Musk-Twitter saga which started with his bid to take over the social media giant this summer, is unfolding with a new twist each day. After firing half of Twitter’s workforce, Musk also ordered the remaining employees to work for 40 hours a week, and claims to be spending morning to night at the headquarters. As his hardcore policies caused a slew of resignations at the firm, a defiant Musk has tweeted that Twitter usage has hit an all time high.

Breakdown on the horizon?

The big claim has come a day after an engineer at the social media giant tweeted that Musk’s decision to delete 80 per cent microservices will break Twitter. After deleting a tweet criticising the decision, Sheon Han again quote tweeted Musk, warning about a massive outage in the next few days. His assertion was in response to the tech enterpreneur’s claim that Twitter only needed 20 per cent of microservices, which he described as bloatware.

Seeing software as a burden

Bloatware is a term used for software which uses too much of disk space and memory to function, and hence slows down a system and causes security risks. Simply put it can be described as the unwanted software or apps that come preloaded in a laptop or on smartphones. But that is what Musk thinks about microservices, which Sheon Han describes as important for the operations at Twitter.

The emperors new tantrums

The engineer has also risked his job by publicly contradicting the new Twitter boss, who has been firing people on social media for criticising him, and also prompted top executives to quit. Musk has justified his decision to fire thousands of employees citing falling ad revenues, which he blamed on activists, and now he is trying to justify shutting down software by calling it a burden. There are also reports that Twitter might go down as soon as Friday night, as the internal platform used by employees is already lagging.