(Replying to PARENT post)
I work at twitter and wasn’t able to find out immediately, but have been collecting responses like these + the article and communicating with someone who knows what to do. I only found out about this over twitter and I am personally deeply frustrated and working to understand whatever led to this.
👤cosmicexplorer🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
Another plausible scenario is the acquisition terms required Smyte to wind down the service over the past 6 months or build a replacement to fulfill contracts. Smyte didn't for whatever reason (either through negligence or negligence+hope to continue operations in a new capacity) and the deadline came to hand over the servers in the agreed condition (no externally accessible APIs available).
Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$.
This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them.
But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."
👤ballenf🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
To a large degree, the responsibility is also on Smyte, right? Selling to a big corp is one thing, and once you are no longer owner of a company you've washed your hands of future decisions. But at the time when they agreed to the sale they were still owners of the company and their hands had not been washed and they could have and arguably should have stipulated some conditions for how the service would be wound down following the sale.
👤savanaly🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
Twitter’s VP of engineering has posted some additional information: https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/101024630798476902...
👤psb31🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
This is one of those instances in which I think employees (developers) and companies working with Twitter need to have a "never forget" attitude. I actually know someone personally at Twitter corp dev (the group that usually manages M&A activity) and I hope that individual was not involved here, as it would be pretty out of character.
👤mbesto🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
Why would Twitter care? They make money from ads, right? APIs and legacy deals are going to be time consuming and boring for them. Stuff like filtering hate speech etc is something which can be done globally and in a way which doesn't require highly paid employees, APIs etc. Hasn't Twitter repeatedly show that third parties aren't really that interesting to them?
👤superflyguy🕑7y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
I'm pretty accustomed to executives making dreadful decisions without the approval/acceptance of other stakeholders within said person's firm. I'd rather know who made this error and not interact with that specific person's department rather than stop doing business (e.g. large ad-buys) with Twitter as a whole.
I don't want this to be a witch-hunt so much as I want the person to just come forward and own the decision, because unless they have an exceptionally good reason for it, it comes off as absurdly high-risk to both Twitter-the-business as well as to all the clients who've likely written serious penalties into their contracts for events like this, which again brings that business risk back full-circle to... Twitter.