Twitter is about to shut down forever. Musk killed it.

You don't understand yet what's happening

Twitter is already in its death throes. Elon walked in and cut its throat.

Start with a loss of 75% of the IT staff.

A group of Engineers wrote an analysis on ZDNet discussing how Twitter is already in its death throes.

Apparently Elon doesn't know the HR rule that you should multiply the number of people in a layoff by 1.5 to estimate the ultimate damage. Lay off 10%, you will lose 15%.

Layoff 50%, and half the people left will quit. Twitter doesn't have any internal IT left.

Elon made no effort to preserve institutional memory of the system either. He fired all the senior people because they were the oldest and got paid the most.

Nobody knows how the system works now.

They have desperately tried to “claw back” some of the fired engineering people but unsurprisingly, few of them have returned. In a depressing reminder of the exploitative state of US immigration policy, almost all of the returnee’s have been H1-b visa workers. The indentured slaves of the American Tech Industry.

On top of that, Twitter runs on a free version of Linux. Not Red Hat Linux.

This is arcane but extremely important. Red Hat Linux is expensive because their business model is like IBM's. They are support consultants and they are some of the best in the world.

The real internet runs on Linux.

Twitter doesn't use that version of Linux. They use an industrial strength freeware version. Much cheaper.

If you have an excellent in-house IT department.

Oh, and they slashed their backup contacts with their Cloud storage contractors. So, no backups either.

Although, when your IT staff is gone, do you really need backups?

When Twitter crashes, and the Engineers on ZDNet gave it no more than 6–8 weeks. When it crashes, it will go dark and probably never be able to be rebooted. Not without starting over and losing most of the content.

If you want a full analysis "Short Takes - 04".