Yet, six months into his tenure as Twitters head, Musk said the biggest crisis he faced came after shutting down one of the companys data centers.
Shutting down one of our server centers was quite difficult, Musk told the BBCs James Clayton on Wednesday, in an extended interview that was also livestreamed on Twitter Spaces.
I thought the server centers were redundant, but there were in fact a lot of things were hard-coded to this one server center, and so when we shut it down, it was quite catastrophic, he said. We lost a lot of functionality and we really rushed to put it back.
Musk said the shutdown happened around late December, early January without providing specifics.
In late December, Musk tweeted that hed disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks. Twitter suffered a severe outage a few days later, with users reporting error messages, blank pages, and other bugs.
Later hiccups
The social media platform has had several hiccups since then.
In February, Twitter users reported being unable to send messages, with the platform telling them that theyd exceeded a daily limit for tweets. The outage was reportedly caused by an employee accidentally deleting internal files that governed how much users could post.
Then, in March, users were briefly unable to click on external links on the platform, getting an error message instead. Twitter blamed the outage on an internal change that had some unintended consequences, while Musk called the platform brittle.
Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside of U.S. business hours.
Musk said that the pain level has been extremely high in running Twitter, with really quite a stressful situation over the last several months. He called the decision to lay off thousands of Twitter employees one of the hardest things he had to do as CEO. (Laid off Twitter employees have complained about the lack of communication around job cuts, as well as late and smaller-than-expected severance payments, and Musk has even argued with laid off employees on the social media platform).
Yet Musk defended his decision to buy Twitter when asked about regrets, saying that while theres a bunch of decisions that could have been made better, alls well that ends well.
