Twitter and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
In an email to employees Monday seen by The New York Times, Musk said the layoffs over the weekend were “a difficult organizational review focused on improving future execution.” He said those still with the company would receive “very significant stock and other compensation awards” on March 24.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Twitter was known for regular crashes and its “Failed Whale,” an image of a whale being airborne by a flock of birds that appeared when the site was down. Over the years, the company added hundreds of people to its infrastructure teams and improved its server technology to mitigate outages, three current and former engineers said.
After Musk took over the company, layoffs began, followed by more substantial changes to back-end technology. On December 24, Twitter closed a data center in Sacramento, which had helped drive much of the web traffic to the service. That left Twitter with just two other facilities, in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon.
Four days later, Twitter experienced a widespread outage, with some users logging out of the service or unable to see replies to their tweets.
Mistakes by employees caused other disruptions. In early February, a Twitter worker removed data from an internal service meant to prevent spam, triggering a flaw that left many people unable to tweet or message each other, according to three people familiar with the incident.
It took Twitter engineers several hours to diagnose the issue and restore the data stored from a backup. At the time, users received error messages saying they couldn’t tweet because they had already posted too much. The Platformer newsletter previously reported the cause of the problem.
A week later, an engineer testing a change to people’s Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices caused another temporary outage. The engineer ignored a past practice of testing new features on small subsets of users and simply rolled out the change, a tweak to Spaces, Twitter’s live audio service, to a broad swath of users, two people familiar with the move said.
