Elon Musk has placed the blame for Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies that scrape large amounts of data, which is used to train language models like those behind ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard.
However, Musk did not mention his own decision to lay off over half of Twitter’s workforce since taking over the company, including individuals crucial for maintaining its infrastructure. These hasty layoffs even resulted in the rehiring of some previously dismissed engineers. Concerns have been repeatedly raised about the impact of these workforce reductions on Twitter’s stability.
A significant outage in March was caused by a change made by a single engineer. It was also reported that Twitter’s bill with Google Cloud remained unpaid for months, reflecting a cost-cutting plan to reduce infrastructure expenses.
In November, an unnamed Twitter engineer interviewed by MIT Technology Review predicted that the staff reductions would lead to more frequent and prolonged technical issues, progressively worsening over time. Site reliability engineer Ben Kreuger also expressed concerns about significant public-facing problems arising within six months. It has now been seven months since those statements were made.