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Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…

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[-] alvvayson@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess I'm also batshit crazy.

It's Twitter. Who cares if people can't tweet for an hour.

I'm with Elon on this, don't overcomplicate the closing of a data center.

That manager, when asked to do it in 90 days, if s/he was competent should have said: I'll do it, but you'll have to accept a downtime risk.

(But aside from this entertaining story, I do think Elon lost his shine. Wasting $40B on twitter and sabotaging Ukraine while simping for Putin and Trump and not paying taxes... yeah, get rekt Elon).

[-] dhork@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago

That manager, when asked to do it in 90 days, if s/he was competent should have said: I'll do it, but you'll have to accept a downtime risk.

That is the correct take in general, but I've worked for managers a bit like Elon before, and that never would have worked. It would have been the equivalent of tendering that resignation, because he sees any pushback at all as insubordination, and not to be tolerated.

The only way out of this is to suggest an alternative course of action, but make it seem like it was his idea all along. My favorite method was to tie it to some bullshit metric he previously set for no reason. "Yes, sir, we could do it right away, but it may have an impact on our ad throughput, and I know ad revenue is a key prioriry you have personally set for the company. If we take the time to transition our ad platform first we can keep our revenue consistent". Then that time ends up identical to the amount of time needed to move things correctly.

It still might not work, but at least you've stroked the Boss's ego, which can keep you employed for a few more months while trying to find the exit ramp.

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[-] stratoscaster@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 year ago

I mean it was more of a data loss and data security risk but okay

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[-] Jocker@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 year ago

Imagine one day, he walks into spacex, board on a rocket, and shoot to mars.. just like this!

Maybe someone should trigger him in twitter

[-] TurtleJoe@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

"Elon musk is a drooling socialist cuck who is apparently far too cowardly to meet my challenge of a firm July 4th, 2024 launch date for his personal mission to mars. Jeff bezos could easily do this if he wasn't too busy actually running the company that he owns."

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[-] 91x@lemmy.sdf.org 22 points 1 year ago

I've heard of chaos testing going as far as walking into a DC and pulling plugs until alarms start going off, but this is just awful all around.

[-] Maybe@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

I really dislike Musk, but I find it hard to criticize this when it generally worked.

The platform formerly known as Twitter is still running, and there’s no more $100 million/year data center.

6-9 months would have meant $50-75 million dollars. I don’t know what the outages and re-engineering ended up costing them, but that’s a ton of money.

[-] scytale@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No, they were just extremely lucky that nothing worse than twitter going down happened. There’s a reason protocols exist for data center moves. The infrastructure manager told Elon that the destination DC in Oregon had different rack and power setups and you just can’t plug and play a server you pulled out of Sacramento. Elon also went under the floorboards and disconnected the power cables and seismic detectors which could’ve caused electrocution, fire, earthquake false alarms, or compromising the detection system itself. Then they were moving equipment that weighed more than what the floor was rated for, which could’ve caused cave-ins or compromising the structural integrity of the floor. Not to mention the possible damage to the equipment by moving them the same way you’d move a couch. They also hired some random cheap moving company they found on yelp to move the servers because they charged 90% less than the existing contractor. No contracts and paid in cash.

Tons of things could’ve gone wrong. Just because downtime was the worst that happened, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do. It is also those same data center protocols that help prevent idiots like Musk from causing catastrophic issues when they pull off stunts like this.

[-] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

First of all, Musk burdened twitter with a level of debt that cost (last estimate that I saw) $1B/year to service. This data center would not have been a problem if he had actually been a good businessman and, you know, didn’t massively overpay with a debt-funded takeover while waiving due diligence on a company he didn’t want in a market he completely doesn’t understand. He set fire to $44B. Twitter’s current valuation has been estimated to be as low as $4B. I personally think that’s low, but the May estimate was $15B (which didn’t include the loss of branding hit).

So his recklessness and complete lack of understanding combined with his overconfidence and incompetence made the $100M savings into peanuts compared to what he destroyed by pulling exactly the same kind of move throughout the business.

Now combine that with the very probable fact that this saved no where near $100M. Shitty shifting of servers breaks hardware. They weren’t prepped to receive them at the destination. They ended up with major drops in service, including Elmo having to shut twitter down for a weekend because they couldn’t handle the traffic. Now he’s whining about “scraping” and trying to squeeze blood from a stone in the face of advertisers abandoning him.

This in no way generally worked. Things are absolutely falling apart around their ears. I’ve stopped even trying to follow twitter links because they work less than half the time since I don’t have an account.

Elon is Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss with a lot of money and a PR firm.

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[-] Fades@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Hahahaha, absolutely in character for that fucking moron

[-] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Batshit crazy for a normal person, just another day for Elon.

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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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