This is what Twitter going down looks like

People, and the media in particular, seemed to think that after Twitter did the first round of mass layoffs, that it would just…stop working.

That clearly hasn’t happened, and it was never a super realistic expectation. These systems are designed to be robust against “one big thing”.

What a large scale system like Twitter falling over looks like is exactly what we keep seeing, week after week. It’s failed image previews, timelines not refreshing, notifications not working, and so on. How many more times will it need to break in critical ways like this before we accept the narrative that there isn’t going to be a single moment where Twitter just stops working.

It’s going to be a slow, gradual decline, which someday will end in 404s or 500s, but the rot has already set in and it’s hard to see it coming back from it.