Twitter is Trying to Cover Up Software Issues as “Routine Maintenance”

Elon Musk’s Twitter continues to face abrupt software outages and now another questionable attempt at transparency has left the remaining employees of the company feeling more burdened than usual.

On Wednesday, Twitter staff experienced what could be called a snow day. They were informed that the company’s Slack platform was offline for “routine maintenance,” and as a result, a deployment freeze was being enforced.

On that very day, the tool Twitter relies on for monitoring tasks including advancements in feature updates to adherence to regulatory standards, Jira, also ceased to function. Consequently, with no communication channel and no work to do, the majority of engineers took a day off.

Jira functionality was restored on Thursday. However, Platformer has been able to verify that the explanation given for Slack’s outage as “routine maintenance” was incorrect. “There is no such thing as ‘routine maintenance.’ That’s bullshit,” a current Slack employee told The Verge.

It appears that Twitter’s failure to pay its Slack bill was not the reason for the outage. Rather, someone at Twitter deliberately shut off access. The motive behind this action remains unknown at the time of writing.

However, it is possible that Musk may have developed a negative stance towards the communication app, or he may want to evaluate Twitter’s ability to function without Slack and the associated expenses.

It’s worth noting that Musk’s Tesla uses Mattermost, a Slack rival, for internal collaboration, as well as Microsoft Outlook and Teams for email and meetings.

On Blind, the anonymous workplace chat app, the loss of such critical tools was greeted with a mix of shock, annoyance, and (to a lesser degree) satisfaction.

According to one employee’s post, “We didn’t pay our Slack bill. Now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.”