The Day Elon Musk Broke Twitter (and the Law)

The stories of Elon Musk at the head of Twitter, now X, have no endand all indications are that this will be the case for some time to come, as the unorthodox management model that the social network billionaire uses seems to serve more to show off, anything, than to ensure that both his operation and yours are sufficient to attract as many users and advertisers as possible. Will we ever understand their reasons? Hopefully.

There are more reports about it these days, the fruit of the official biography of Elon Musk, written by the prestigious Walter Isaacson, who many of us remember for the great work he did on the Steve Jobs biography. On this occasion, as with the co-founder of Apple, the journalist interviewed Musk several times, and as he had already managed to do on other occasions, he managed to get stories that, we must admit, would be common among mortals. choose to hide.

I’ll admit that with its highlights and shadows, Steve Jobs’ biography felt essential. I wouldn’t have achieved that qualification with Elon Musk, although it’s true that I did Its role in the technology sector has been remarkable in recent decades. Now, since the book seems to have some “confessions” to some pretty controversial decisions, I won’t deny that I’ve put it on my list of books I’d like to pick up and check out.

As I said, the biography is very close to publication, and as is often the case in these cases, the publisher and author whet the appetite with the occasional preview of what we’ll find. So as we can read on CNBC, Elon Musk wanted to “rapidly” move Twitter servers from one data center to another, which could violate the law and cause a number of technical problems. In fact, as Musk himself states in the book, some of these issues have dragged on for months, and it’s possible that some of them are still active.

We have to go back to the end of 2022 when part of Twitter’s servers were hosted in NTT’s data centerin Sacramento, California, at a time when neither NTT wanted to keep Twitter as a client because they didn’t trust its economic capacity (to keep paying the bills, wow), nor did Elon Musk want to continue to face the $100 million+ a year it had to pay to use said devices in which servers owned by Twitter were located.

So we come to the night of December 22, 2022, when Musk meets with two company engineers to inform him of the deadlines necessary to move these servers from NTT’s CPD in Sacramento to the X data center in Portland, Oregon. The engineers replied that between six and nine months were required (a conversion of this type is exceptionally complex). Musk replied that they had to do it within 90 days or they would be fired.

To show that it was possible, and in the company of two family members, The next day, Musk decided to go to the NTT CPD in Sacramento to see for himself if it was as complicated as he was told. So, mid-flight to Austin, he made the plane (yes, his famous jet) divert to a new destination. Once there, he went to the NTT facility and, equipped with a hand knife, took apart the technical floorboard, entered the register, disconnected the server, and concluded that it was much easier than they intended.

Next? You can imagine that he wanted to start the transfer immediately, although NTT prevented him from doing so, for fear that they might damage their equipment. Work resumed on the 27th, with stacks of servers full of personal data, retrieved in any way, traveling more than 900 kilometers. And yes, dates are pretty important because under no circumstances, legally, could they be transferred in this waythe data should have been stored on other media and deleted before making the trip.

Consequence? Twitter suffered tremendous volatility in the following two months Even Musk himself eventually admitted that such actions were a mistake.«In hindsight, the entire Sacramento shutdown was a mistake […]I was told we have redundancy across our data centers. I was not told that we have 70,000 hardcoded links to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.«. Let’s hope he decides to listen to the engineers next time…