50% chance that Twitter may ‘crash’ during FIFA World Cup due to traffic surge, says insider
There is a 50 per cent chance that Twitter could face a major outage during the football World Cup that starts today (November) in Qatar, said an insider who recently exited the company. “Between the lack of preparations and the lack of staffing, I think it’s going to be a rough World Cup for Twitter,” the former employee was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“It’s likely to struggle with traffic at kick-off, and may crash. If we’re lucky, it will recover with minimal disruption," the insider added.
According to the publication, the insider has knowledge of the workings of the Twitter Command Centre where issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages are resolved.
He added that there is a great possibility of "something going wrong that users would see" when the traffic spike is incredibly high.
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, he has been on a spree to reduce the bloated headcount. The billionaire CEO fired half of the company's 7,500 workforce in the first week, before laying off the contractors. Earlier this week, Musk brought the sledgehammer down once again as 1,000 more workers resigned after being served an ultimatum.
Several experts have cast aspersions that Twitter may be a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode as it remains ill-equipped to deal with traffic spikes.
While the insider paints a dystopian picture, Elon Musk has been hyping the Qatar World Cup by urging users to come on the platform to catch all the action.
"First World Cup match on Sunday! Watch on Twitter for best coverage & real-time commentary,” tweeted Musk.
On Saturday, Musk added that the server load was insane, a day before the mega event.
"Server load is insane rn. Good stress test before World Cup tomorrow!"
Musk understands that the marquee quadrennial event is a big crowd-puller for the microblogging platform. Various reports have suggested that the 2014 Brazil WC boosted Twitter's Q2 revenue while the 2018 Russia WC saw Twitter receive as many as 115 billion impressions.
