Twitter has ‘50% chance’ of major crash during World Cup, says disgruntled former employee

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Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events.

The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform’s team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages.

“Between the lack of preparations and the lack of staffing, I think it’s going to be a rough World Cup for Twitter,” said the former employee.

He suggested that an incident of some kind – such as a service responding slowly or incorrectly – is almost a certainty during the 29-day competition in Qatar, estimating a 90% possibility of something going wrong that users would see.

The likelihood of Twitter staying online during the competition, which kicks off on Sunday, is no better than even, according to the former employee.

Twitter is “likely to struggle with traffic at kickoff, and may crash,” he said. “If we’re lucky, it will recover with minimal disruption.”

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