Courtney Nash’s LinkedIn profile says she is a cyber incident librarian. Your job is to keep track of how things fail and go wrong on the internet.

For the past three months, Nash, a senior researcher at VOID, or Verica Open Incident Database, a public database of reports of Internet errors and outages, has been keeping tabs on Twitter.

Nash points to a key reason for the disruptions: huge layoffs that wiped out about two-thirds of Twitter’s workforce in about 100 days. From about 7,500 employees when Musk acquired it, Twitter reportedly now has about 1,800 employees. The cuts included Twitter engineers, who Nash said play a critical role in maintaining one of the largest and busiest social platforms in the world.

“These people have had years, in some cases even a decade, to understand how this system is set up and how it’s supposed to work,” Nash told The Examiner. “They have a lot of intimate knowledge of what looks weird and wrong.”

Twitter was not immediately available for comment.

In an interview with The Examiner, Nash spoke about how impressed she’s been with how well the Twitter platform has held up during a turbulent transition — why she and others worry about the site’s degradation amid uncertainty under Musk.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

According to your observations, how is the Twitter platform doing? Many of us have foretold calamity and darkness, and many of us will admit that we were wrong about how bad it was going to be. But it shows creaks and cracks, the kind of errors those of us who study complex systems have predicted, and the folks who’ve worked at Twitter have predicted, too.

We’re seeing more performance drops, more widespread outages, things just take longer to even work. There are many reasons why this could be so. But the biggest credit, which I think everyone was right about, is the loss of expertise in managing this system.

What do you mean by that? people are gone Did you need 7,000 people to run Twitter? Maybe not. Need more than 1,800? Probably. We see that.

Twitter is technically designed to stay active for that long. It’s a very resilient distributed system. It was designed to tolerate a lot of turbulence.

But part of it was that there were people behind the scenes. When the turbulence really increased, they knew how to adjust and how to deal with it and what parts of the systems could creak and break. Many of these people are gone.

can you break this down Who are these people and what were their duties that are not being fulfilled now? The layoffs have affected Twitter employees across the board. In particular, we’ve seen a loss of people who we think are on the infrastructure side — people who know how the databases work, how the tools work, how their deployment tools work, people involved in incident response. Most of these people are gone.

These people have had years, in some cases a decade, to understand how this system was set up, how it was supposed to work. They have a lot of intimate knowledge of what looks weird and wrong. You can go in and look at all kinds of tools. You can look at the monitoring and graphs and all those things.

Many of these people in the industry are called site reliability engineers. SREs is a term you might see and they really are the people responsible for the reliability of the site. These people are all gone.

If you just take someone who doesn’t know how all the plumbing works and something isn’t right, they don’t even know where to look.

Can we go a little deeper? How are the issues manifesting in terms of what has been reported, things that Twitter has externally confirmed? One of the things that was reported and was pretty obvious was that they took one of their data centers out of the equation. They used to have three data centers. And now they only have two. And I think it was a day after they got rid of the Sacramento data center that they had one of their biggest outages.

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Typically, all of Twitter has been conceived or designed to allow for what is known as failover. So if you have a problem, you can move things from one data center to another. So when they just shut down Sacramento, the people who designed this data center, the people who built the systems, weren’t even there to tell you what would go wrong if you got rid of it.

That was one of the things that I think really manifested and a reported fact that I was able to point out. There are many other things I can’t tell you exactly. But that’s a really obvious one. They did this so quickly that there was no way they could have planned how their system would rely on this one data center.

Let’s go back to something you said. There were predictions that Twitter would simply collapse after Musk’s acquisition, but it didn’t. The one we didn’t take into account – and in hindsight, it’s fantastic, isn’t it? – Twitter really was that well built. I mean it was the side that we all like to hate or hate to love.

It kind of always existed in a run down state because there were so many pressures and it was always changing and scaling. But it was really well built. So you could go from 7,000 to 1,800 employees and still have the fundamentals that kept it going

So this is a credit to (former CEOs) Parag Agrawal and Jack Dorsey? It is a credit to the engineers. From the very top, there were business goals and all of that stuff, and that involved promotion and content moderation. But the engineers had to decide how to support that. And they had to be able to do that for a long time.

Twitter has been around for a long time. I’m not going to get into the debates about whether or not it was a successful business at the time. I think your point is correct, it still succeeds to some extent. We have not seen how the finances will develop. But it still works. And I think that’s because the systems were built to be very adaptable and resilient.

Do you think you can still do what it was with 1,800 people? That remains to be seen. But we’re still skeptical.

Why? To be financially viable, you need engineered systems that can respond incredibly quickly to many changes and experiments. If you’re objectively nice to what Musk is doing, there’s a lot to experiment with and a lot to change.

You need expertise so your systems can potentially do things they haven’t done before. An example of one thing that didn’t go so well was when they tried to change how Twitter Blue works, how the Blue Check stuff works, and fast.

If it’s going to be successful and trying to adapt to new business models and new things, it’s going to be hard to do with an emergency staff. Without years of expertise in how the guts of Twitter work, it’s going to be difficult.

If you want to build on that and try new things and push those systems forward in truly unique ways, the expertise of how the system originally worked must still be there. And most of it is gone.

Can you do it with 1,800 people? Maybe – but not 1,800 people who don’t know how it’s really supposed to work. Expertise is so priceless. It’s not the sheer number of people. It’s what was on the minds of those who are no longer around.

There are also concerns about a rise in hate speech on Twitter. Elon Musk himself has made controversial statements or posts. What is your own call for how this might work?

I would just say if fighting hate speech is a business value for Twitter then they don’t have the investment and they don’t have the staff to do it right now. If they’re concerned about advertising and advertising perception and infrastructure, you need to support what they’re not doing.

You essentially need a team and the expertise to ensure that the kind of content that might turn off advertisers doesn’t appear alongside the ads that advertisers want to show users.

Yes. You need non-technical people to make decisions about this and ensure it. And you need the techs to make sure that doesn’t appear next to this ad. As far as we know, these people no longer exist.

What has been the most disturbing development for you on how things have unfolded under Elon Musk over the past 100 days? I worry that other leaders will think that gutting your expertise is a business model that will work. We’ve all seen that you can’t just get rid of experts and people who know how systems work and work. But this is a grand experiment being conducted on a public stage. Then right now we are seeing an economic climate in which the reduction of manpower and employees is very attractive for company managements. That would be my concern – a skills crisis if you will, and that we feel like we can get rid of experts and still go ahead and have everything work as it should.

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More than 2 million people in the United States live in homes without running water or basic plumbing.

From New York City to the Navajo Nation, people across the country are facing climate-driven water scarcity, exorbitant utility bills, aging or incomplete infrastructure, community disinvestment, and political inertia, all of which limit or completely cut off access to essential water resources .

America’s water gap exacts a significant price on the well-being of individuals and the overall economy. More than $8.5 billion is lost annually as a result of time spent collecting water, high health care bills related to injuries, waterborne illness, and mental health challenges associated with water insecurity, according to a June 2022 report from nonprofit DigDeep.

The water gap persists in all 50 states, from urban to remote communities, but it is not socially or geographically random. Water insecurity is associated with other socioeconomic disparities and disproportionately impacts communities of color. According to DigDeep, Indigenous households are 19 times more likely than white households to live without plumbing. Black and Latino households are twice as likely.

While rural homes are the most likely to lack running water, the majority of Americans residing in unplumbed homes live in cities. Plumbing poverty in urban areas is getting worse. Researchers found the average tenant in San Francisco living without piped water spent 44% of their income on rent in 2017. Water connection fees in San Francisco can cost several thousands of dollars—a financial burden low-income renters cannot afford, and negligent landlords may not want to pay.

While urban residents considered “plumbing poor” are hidden in plain sight, rural residents impacted most severely by the water gap are almost entirely hidden from the nation’s collective consciousness. In colonias along Texas’ southwestern border with Mexico, tens of thousands of people live without access to running water or sewer service. Any water they can access is believed to be unsafe, contaminated with arsenic, E. coli, and other harmful toxins.

Over the last 40 years, federal water infrastructure funding has fallen from 63% to roughly 9% leaving communities without the financial resources to upgrade and expand water and sewage systems. However, the White House says the recent infusion of money via President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Job Act will speed up progress in prioritized underserved communities.

Passed in November 2021, the law allocates roughly $50 billion for programs designed to improve state and local drinking water and wastewater treatment infrastructure. The Environmental Protection Agency also distributed $154 million to tribal territories and Native Alaskan villages. The average per-state funding for all 50 states was $138.7 million.

Even for the millions of Americans with access to basic plumbing and running water, utility bills are unaffordable. A 2018 analysis by the Guardian found that across a sampling of 12 major US cities, water and sewage bills had increased by an average of 80% in just eight years, with low-income households bearing the greatest burden.

In 11 out of the 12 cities included in the study, 100% of people with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty threshold could not afford their water bills. According to the study, water bills exceeding 4% of household income are considered, for this analysis, unaffordable. This problem is not isolated just to the lowest-income households. Over the next eight years, average Americans neglected by federal funding are likely to feel the pressure of high-cost utilities in cities with low-quality water and wasteful infrastructure.

Stacker determined the 10 metro areas in the US most lacking in complete plumbing facilities based on the percentage of people in each metro without this basic access. The data is sourced from the 2020 five-year American Community Survey US Census Bureau. The census question asks whether a housing unit has hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, as well as other questions about kitchen appliances. Puerto Rico was excluded from these results.

At a county-by-county level, the reasons why people lack access to basic plumbing are not closely or consistently tracked. Where we could find specifics, we have listed those here. Where we could not, we’ve provided contextual information about the state of that metro area’s water and sewage infrastructure.

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS / AP / KPIX) – Millions of online users lost access to popular websites and services when Amazon’s cloud service network went down for hours on Tuesday, even disrupting its own delivery service for its customers. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities, and corporations, including The Associated Press.

About five hours after numerous companies and other organizations began reporting issues with Amazon Web Services, the company said in a post on the AWS Status page that it had “mitigated” the underlying problem that caused the outage . Shortly thereafter, it was reported that “many services have already recovered,” but noted that others were still working on a full recovery.

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The problem primarily affected Amazon’s web services in the eastern United States, it said. The problems started this morning on the US east coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence company – including Amazon’s own e-commerce operation.

In a statement, Amazon spokesman Richard Rocha confirmed that the AWS failure had also caused problems in Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations. Rocha added that the company is “working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible”.

It is not just large companies that have felt the effects of the Amazon Web Services shutdown. It is unclear how or if the Amazon outage affected the federal government. The US agency for cybersecurity and infrastructure security said in an email response to questions that it was working with Amazon “to understand the possible impact of this outage on federal agencies or other partners.”

What is certain is that when a great service like this fails, there is a domino effect that can be felt worldwide.

“The reason we’re seeing this more often is because the internet is centralized,” said CNET editor at Large Ian Sherr.

Deliveries were canceled, some apps were unresponsive, and customers trying to book flights with airlines were unable to connect. Those were just a few of the problems.

Students like Kayley Flanagan also felt the effects.

“Some people were in the middle of the finale when it shut down and they couldn’t access it,” Flanagan said.

Platforms like Canvas, which enable online learning and teaching for academic institutions as well, are closed, leaving students desperate and desperate for answers on social media.

“I couldn’t access my homework or the study guides for the final exams,” Flanagan said.

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“Thirty, 40 years ago, when we first developed the Internet, the whole idea was to have it decentralized and to have information accessible from anywhere in case there was an attack,” said Sherr.

Scherr believes centralizing the Internet with a handful of companies under control is part of the problem as incidents like Tuesday’s outage with huge economic repercussions are just waiting to happen.

“A lot of companies rely on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and as a result, things can go wrong and it can get really bad online,” said Sherr.

Customers trying to book or rebook trips with Delta Air Lines have had problems connecting with the airline. “Delta is working quickly to restore functionality to our AWS-supported phone lines,” said spokesman Morgan Durrant. The airline apologized and urged customers to use their website or mobile app instead.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines said it switched to west coast servers after some airport-based systems were affected by the outage. Customers reported DownDetector, a popular clearinghouse for user outage reporting, still outages, more than three hours after launch. Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said there had been no major flight disruptions.

Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin said the company’s eastern US region for dealer services has declined. The company has apps that access inventory data, monthly payment calculators, service bulletins, and other items. More than 20 apps were affected.

According to DownDetector, people who tried using Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney + have reported problems. The McDonald’s app was also down. But American, United, Alaska and JetBlue airlines were not affected. Kentik posted a 26% decrease in traffic to Netflix, among the top web-based services hit by the outage.

Madory said he didn’t think the failure was anything nefarious. He said a recent accumulation of outages among providers hosting large websites reflects the evolution of the networking industry. “More and more of these outages are the result of the automation and centralization of administration,” he said. “This ultimately leads to failures that are difficult to completely avoid due to operational complexity, but are very effective when they occur.”

Public data access technologist and public data access activist Carl Malamud said the outage shows how much the internet’s original design goal – a distributed network with no central point of failure that makes it resilient to mass disasters like a nuclear attack – has been skewed by big tech.

“If we put everything in one place, be it the cloud from Amazon or the monolith from Facebook, we are violating this basic principle,” said Malamud, who developed the Internet’s first radio station and later an important database for the US Security and Stock Exchange Commission online posed. “We saw when Facebook became the instrument of a massive disinformation campaign, we only saw it today with the failure of Amazon.”

Kenny Choi contributed to this report.

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© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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