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Sometime soon, Twitter will crash badly. Here's why. Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, and it appears he's already failing on his promise not to turn Twitter into a 'free-for-all hellscape.' But, I'm not here to talk about his policy blunders. That's a story for another day. No, I'm here to predict that Twitter, the site, will soon crash. And, once it fails, it won't be coming up for a while. Why? Simple. You can't lay off half of the staff of a cloud-based social network and expect things to keep running smoothly for Twitter's 450 million monthly active users. Indeed, Twitter accounts are already failing in odd ways. For example, Benjamin Dreyer, author of "Dreyer's English" and copy chief of Random House, found that the vast majority of replies to one of his tweets were vanishing into the aether. He wasn't the only one. Even Musk appears to have realized that maybe firing every other person was a mistake. On Monday, November 7th, he tried to get workers, especially software engineers, to return. Good luck with that. According to my Twitter sources and tweets on the site, they're not coming back. As Gergely Orosz, editor and author of the popular software engineering and management blog, The Pragmatic Engineer, said, "Several people who were let go on Friday, then asked to come back were given less than an hour as a deadline. Software engineers who got this call ... all said 'no' and the only ones who could eventually say 'yes' are on visas." Managers, according to my sources and Orosz, are "getting desperate, trying to call back more people. People are saying 'no' + more sr engineers are quitting." Orosz added, "None of this is surprising. As a rule of thumb, you get an additional half attrition after you lay off X% of people. Lay off 10%: expect another 5% to quit. Lay off 50%... not unreasonable to expect another 25% to quit." And, you can't expect to replace social network and cloud experts with Tesla embedded system engineers and get anything done. I'm a good technology and business writer, but no one in their right mind would hire me to write opera arias. Let's look at Twitter's technology, shall we? Twitter runs on CentOS 7. This free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone comes to the end of its life at the end of June 2024. The leading choices for what to replace it with should be RHEL 9, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux. But instead of working on that transition, what few system administrators Twitter has left are both trying to get the platform ready for Musk's laundry list of new features and keeping it patched and up-to-date. That's a problem. You see, unlike RHEL, where a big part of the attraction is that you can depend on Red Hat for first-rate support, CentOS, Rocky, and AlmaLinux are all primarily meant for companies with in-house staff who already know Linux servers backward and forward. That's no longer the case at Twitter. For more visit OUR FORUM.