Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

>>prawn+(OP)
At the start of this saga, I pointed to Napoleon as an example of what happens when hyper-ambitious and capable people meet an unyielding challenge,

    > It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
    > 
    > Right up until the moment you can't.

But never in my wildest dreams I could have imagined this turn of events. Forget Napoleon's retreat from a burning Moscow, this decision is as if Napoleon had decided to light the city on fire himself.

It is unfathomable. What happened?

All he had to do was nothing. One strategy could have been to wait for a few months, kept teams in place, offers assurances of continuity, do an audit of systems, and then swoop in to make changes. Even at $4M/day it would have cost far, far less than this.

In my mind, the most valuable thing about these circumstances is that they offer an opportunity for us to learn.

Right now, the burning question I have in my mind is one I asked a few weeks ago, what's the MTBF for such a platform?

From a thread 23 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701999 ,

There's a pattern of diverging expectations here, one is the non-technical/naïve one,

    - Twitter is going to go down tomorrow and it's all over. RIP.

The second is,

    - Twitter is going to experience a failure cascade over time.

The third is,

    - It's all going to be fine.

I suspect that the real question is, how many individual wires can break before the cable holding the suspended platform snaps?

I am not that good of a developer, but watching Twitter I can't help but be reminded of Arecibo, except at a larger, more abstract scale. There was no single massive event that caused the failure, rather a series of factors and events, tiny cables breaking that eventually leads to a failure cascade that then causes the suspended platform to crash.

From what I can tell, in the past week or so, [note: this was written 3 weeks ago]

    - Twitter's copyright system failed

    - Two Factor Authentication broke down (it seems to be back up?)

    - (anecdata) Tweets have been loading sporadically for me and other people, sometimes we try to open a tweet and it says that it doesn't exist. Happens more frequently with new/recent tweets.

    - (unconfirmed) Twitter's managed account backend is behaving "strangely." For e.g., "One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated." from https://www.teamblind.com/post/i-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750kmonth-twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft ———— Friends have told me other similar stories

Are these failures symptomatic of a larger problem, or are they well-isolated parts misbehaving? Can Twitter even experience a failure cascade like Arecibo? Can that be paused/stopped?

I am asking this question because I don't know. And I'd like to develop a better mental model to understand what happens next.

zlacker