Twitter has had a bumpy ride after Elon Musk took over the social media platform last October, as the company has gone through massive layoffs, problems with paid verification, and companies pausing their ad spending.
Yet, six months into his tenure as Twitter’s head, Musk said the “biggest crisis” he faced came after shutting down one of the company’s data centers.
“Shutting down one of our server centers was quite difficult,” Musk told the BBC’s James Clayton on Wednesday, in an extended interview that was also livestreamed on Twitter Spaces.
“I thought the server centers were redundant, but…in fact a lot of things were hard-coded to this one server center, and so when we shut it down, it was quite catastrophic,” he said. “We lost a lot of functionality, and we really rushed to put it back.”
Musk said the shutdown happened “around late December, early January” without providing specifics.
In late December, Musk tweeted that he’d “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.” Twitter suffered a severe outage a few days later, with users reporting error messages, blank pages, and other bugs.
Later hiccups
The social media platform has had several hiccups since then.
In February, Twitter users reported being unable to send messages, with the platform telling them that they’d exceeded a “daily limit” for tweets. The outage was reportedly caused by an employee accidentally deleting internal files that governed how much users could post.
Then, in March, users were briefly unable to click on external links on the platform, getting an error message instead. Twitter blamed the outage on “an internal change that had some unintended consequences,” while Musk called the platform “brittle.”
Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside U.S. business hours.
Musk said that the “pain level has been extremely high” in running Twitter, with “really quite a stressful situation over the last several months.” He called the decision to lay off thousands of Twitter employees “one of the hardest things” he had to do as CEO. (Laid-off Twitter employees have complained about the lack of communication around job cuts, as well as late and smaller-than-expected severance payments, and Musk has even argued with laid-off employees on the social media platform.)
Yet Musk defended his decision to buy Twitter when asked about regrets, saying that while “there’s a bunch of decisions that could have been made better, all’s well that ends well.”