How will Twitter end? Not with a bang but a whimper, explains our chief technical officer Ben Gracewood.

Think of Twitter right now like the fusebox in your house. Most of the time you don’t even care about it. But if a fuse blows and no one knows how to fix it, or if you’ve fired over half of your fuse repairers and locked the rest of them out of the office, then it’s a bit trickier. The house probably won’t burn down immediately, but it’s dark and only half the power outlets work.

Or, for a more visual description, Elon Musk is Wile E. Coyote off the edge of the cliff, suddenly remembering that you can’t buy your way out of gravity, even for US$44b:

When will Twitter end?

That’s hard to say. I reckon it will coast for a while, maybe hours or days. Maybe all the way to the Fifa World Cup next week or some other event that significantly increases the load.

The likely scenario is that things at Twitter start failing, and instead of “Jolanda who knows how to fix that” fixing it before anyone notices, “Jeff, just some guy” has to spend hours working out which server to access and which commands to run. And that’s the best-case scenario.

If both Jolanda or Jeff have refused to be more hardcore, then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe Twitter never comes back? Maybe things get so badly out of sync that it’s unrecoverable.

What do you mean, ‘out of sync’?

I’ve worked on systems that process hundreds of requests per second, which is nowhere near Twitter’s scale but likely used similar approaches. We made extensive use of queuing: commands and processes are dumped in a queue and processed, usually within microseconds. But if the thing processing the queue stopped for a bit, the queue would quickly back up and take hours to drain, even when everything was fixed.

One time, it took four days to process the queue backlog after an outage. I can imagine Twitter’s queuing systems very, very quickly getting to the point where it’s logistically impossible to drain them. Maybe you delete a bunch of queued-up likes and retweets to clear the queue, which means that the tweet you just liked never actually gets updated.

Could Twitter survive?

Absolutely. Even if everything I’ve posited above happens, over and over again, Twitter still has everyone’s logins, tweets, and social graph. Heck, Twitter has been through this before when it first went viral: the famous fail whale, where Twitter would go offline for minutes fairly regularly when under heavy load.

If Elon Musk drives Twitter bankrupt, it’s likely to be taken over by someone who would like to keep it running. Maybe they lure a handful of “Jolandas who know how to fix that” back to the company, and they spend the next 6-12 months just making sure the site runs and slowly build back the capability to handle massive load while also making improvements.

Or it just gets unceremoniously turned off like so many others that came before. 🫡