The malfunction the other day highlighted, if there was still a need, that Twitter has serious difficulties with its infrastructure. And perhaps something to do with the non-payments to Amazon as well.
There were perhaps some who imagined that Twitter’s complete capitulation would come with in major events, such as the World Cup last December, but instead. All it took was a simple code update error on a trivial Monday to make us realize that Twitter is now sailing the Internet sea without an engine, by inertia. Ready to stop completely at the first major cliff that will determine its demise.
Look, this is not a synthetic reconstruction or perhaps related to easy sentimentality, because we all care about Twitter, but it is the simple truth. Unless things change, and fast.
But just to give more context, it has come to light in recent days that, in fact, Twitter has serious problems with its own infrastructure, the infrastructure that allows it to run the platform as we see it.
In recent days, news reports have been reporting on the clash with the giant Amazon, which is the provider of some of the cloud services that Twitter needs to use. Well, Amazon is demanding that the agreement signed in December 2020, which was supposed to be strategic (Jack Dorsey was still there) for Twitter, be honored, complaining about missed payments totaling $70 million.
In retaliation, the giant founded by Jeff Bezos is threatening not to pay $1 million in advertising, for the first quarter of 2023.
The malfunction now frequently occurring on the platform is now to be referred to an increasingly precarious and weak technical infrastructure. An outcome that is the consequence of the layoff of nearly 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.
A few days ago, one of the many engineers fired by Elon Musk described Twitter as a company that now moves on the basis of what has been done before, almost by inertia, ready to stop for good at the first major difficulty.
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Curious to note how Twitter actually takes very little advantage of Amazon’s cloud services, on which Twitter Spaces and little else rest. It’s also worth mentioning that Twitter had proposed to Amazon to review the arrangements, a review that they rejected from Seattle.
But Twitter instead uses Google Cloud on which almost the entire platform rests, under a $1 billion, 5-year agreement. On this Twitter has not asked for revisions and payments are on time. Perhaps it is because Google still remains a major investor and it pays to maintain good relations even for indexing on the search engine.
Now, faced with this situation Elon Musk’s comment confirms that, strange to say for someone like him, that he does not know what he is talking about. To solve everything with “you have to rewrite the code,” is to have no idea how the platform is structured. And after five months it is actually starting to raise more than one concern.
Not to mention that, on balance, the drop in revenues from advertising in 2022 was 40 percent, and no objective data is known for the first few months of this year. But given the trend, it’s easy to think that the downward trend has continued and the goal of $3 billion by the end of the year is increasingly distant.