Meeting at Twitter Headquarters Finds Two of the Significant Issues Currently on Twitter – Elon Musk

Here are the two significant issues that were found and discussed at Twitter’s headquarters today.

Read more about it below.

Issues in the Fanout Service and in the Recommendation Algorithm

After the long meeting held at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, Twitter CEO and owner, Elon Musk took it to the Twitter platform to share the current issues that were identified in its platform.

The first issue was with the fan-out service. As per what has been identified at the meeting, Twitter’s fan-out service is overloaded and Musk himself has faced issues when he tried posting a tweet.

The fan-out service is what sends a tweet or message from one Twitter user to multiple users and when the service is overloaded, the messages won’t get delivered. Elon Musk has also mentioned in the Twitter post that when he tried to post his tweet, he saw that 95% of the tweets weren’t delivered to due the overload in the fan-out service.

He has also made it clear that if by chance the fan-out service crash it is sure to destroy all the tweets which are in queue.

The second issue that was found out was in the recommendation algorithm. Twitter’s recommendation algorithm used absolute block count instead of percentile block count, and here block count means the number of users blocking a particular Twitter user or account.

So the issue is, when the absolute block count is taken into consideration to create a recommendation list, many Twitter accounts with many followers will be excluded from the list. They might be only having 0.1% blocks compared to their number of followers, but using the absolute block count to create the recommendation list is sure to exclude any Twitter user even if he/she has a million followers.

Nothing about when the issue will be fixed or what steps Twitter is planning to take hasn’t been addressed in the post by Musk.

However he has mentioned in a tweet following this post, that the issue with oversized fonts and undersized paragraph spacing will be fixed by this week.

Long day at Twitter HQ with eng team

Two significant problems mostly addressed:

1. Fanout service for Following feed was getting overloaded when I tweeted, resulting in up to 95% of my tweets not getting delivered at all. Following is now pulling from search (aka Earlybird).… https://t.co/oMW54chhRz

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2023