The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨stopthatgirl7@kbin.social⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the-batshit-crazy-story-of-the-day-elon-musk-decided-to-personally-rip-servers-out-of-a-sacramento-data-center/

Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…

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Fades@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Hahahaha, absolutely in character for that fucking moron

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Maybe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I really dislike Musk, but I find it hard to criticize this when it generally worked.

The platform formerly known as Twitter is still running, and there’s no more $100 million/year data center.

6-9 months would have meant $50-75 million dollars. I don’t know what the outages and re-engineering ended up costing them, but that’s a ton of money.

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- stopthatgirl7@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Looks like you’re the type the writer talks about at the end:
  
  There’s something to be said for pushing back on needless rules and bureaucracy, but it helps if you actually understand stuff before doing so, rather than doing something like this that had half a dozen ways it could have ended in serious disaster and possible tragedy. The fact that it “only” resulted in Twitter falling over every few weeks for months likely means that Musk and his supporters got the very wrong lesson out of this.
  
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  - Maybe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    What risks, exactly? Twitter goes down? Proprietary Twitter data gets stolen in some server heist scenario?
    
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- Everblue@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s like saying why wear PPE and follow safety protocols on a construction site, it’ll save us money if we don’t do any of that. Nobody died or got hurt? Perfect.
  
  There’s a reason things need to be done a certain way, if something had gone wrong what would’ve been the consequences? What if all those data racks full of personal user information were just straight up stolen by the random movers they hired off the street?? What if the floor had collapsed under the weight of the servers being moved, tipped the server over and crushed someone? Just because things worked out relatively fine doesn’t mean no harm no foul.
  
  Musk is an idiot. Deciding to do things his way to save money and time reflects poorly on all his other companies.
  
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  - fruitleatherpostcard@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Are the severs running SSDs or hard disks?
    
    I remember the story of the guy moving a shopping cart full of his company’s HDs across the street or something and destroying them all just rattling the fucking cart across the shitty surface.
    
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- exussum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The problem is risk. A lot of the bureaucracy that exists for any company is risk mitigation. The wiping of servers, or using suction cups, or any of that is a security against a large dollar amount to spend if something goes wrong. But that’s just the cost of security, it’s worthless if it isn’t tested. If a locked door isn’t rattled or deter someone, it might as well have been unlocked.
  
  He took a gamble and the doors were not rattled and everything worked. The thing to criticize here is really the carelessness. What if one of those servers got out and somebody stole all of that data? What if while under those floorboards he got damaged, or something related did? And it’s not just these two questions, there’s stuff in that article that probably wasn’t covered that we can question.
  
  There may be things that are not in the book that we can question, and that is the problem with Elon. He needs a string of bad luck to show how truly dangerous he is.
  
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- scytale@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  No, they were just extremely lucky that nothing worse than twitter going down happened. There’s a reason protocols exist for data center moves. The infrastructure manager told Elon that the destination DC in Oregon had different rack and power setups and you just can’t plug and play a server you pulled out of Sacramento. Elon also went under the floorboards and disconnected the power cables and seismic detectors which could’ve caused electrocution or fire. Then they were moving equipment that weighed more than what the floor was rated for. Not to mention the possible damage to the equipment by moving them the same way you’d move a couch. They also hired some random cheap moving company from yelp to move the servers. No contracts and paid in cash.
  
  Tons of things could’ve gone wrong. Just because downtime was the worst that happened, doesn’t mean it’s ok to do.
  
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G59@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Well that was a crazy read! I really feel for the workers who had to witness all that nonsense.

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flathead@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for this prat, the frustration at being told it will take months to move systems is understandable. Also, the idiot developers who hard-coded the data center location deserve to be fired. Data center floor tiles can be removed easily with a flat blade as a lever instead of using suction cups.

Obviously a coke-fuelled man-child doing it in the middle of the night is ridiculous but if you have unlimited resources you can move any number of servers in a few days, easily. In some ways it’s impressive that he was able to pull this off on a whim without a catastrophe (the DeSantis fiasco notwithstanding). It definitely should not have been suggested by a competent data center engineer that it would take months to move anything if the CEO wants it in weeks. Even though he’s an ass, I don’t blame him for being annoyed about that.

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- redcalcium@lemmy.institute ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Remember he just gutted Twitter before pulling this stunt, so the estimate of a few months to move the servers might be true if the entire department that handle infra has been gutted with only skeleton crew left.
  
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  - flathead@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well, yes. If nobody left has a clue then it’s going to take a little longer but you could physically move just about anything in a few weeks with the right crew, even if you had to bring them in cold. An open checkbook solves a lot of logistical problems.
    
    The proof is more or less self evident. If this idiot and his cousin were able to pull it off without breaking anything critical, then it stands to reason that a properly managed team would have been able to do it in a more orderly way in a few days.
    
    I get that everyone wants to paint this as completely irresponsible, but apart from the fact that it was done so haphazardly in the dead of night and gate crashing the data center security (nobody is going to refuse access to the CEO), there’s really nothing here that’s completely out of order. Locking the gear in the trucks is pretty standard for intact secure data transport. The real mistake is the infra manager sandbagging the move estimate - or not understanding how to plan and execute it.
    
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repungnant_canary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Stop making stupid people famous!

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- DoctorTYVM@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  This behaviour isn’t because he’s famous it’s because he’s incredibly wealthy and no one has ever told him no.
  
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  - repungnant_canary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    While this is of course true, to me part of saying him no is not giving him media attention. If his stunts didn’t have the publicity they do, he might not actually do them. If people stopped caring about whatever shit he writes on Twitter then he wouldn’t have a power to destroy Starlink’s government deal or affect stock values.
    
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realitista@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I sold my Tesla stock that I had held for many years not long after he took over Tesla.

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- weew@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  …so you sold your Tesla stock before it was even a public company?
  
  lol what bullshit. Elon Musk was literally one of the first and biggest investor in the company before they even began designing their first car. That’s when he “took over” (and thus got to be named as a founder)
  
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- sugartits@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  I sold my Tesla stock
  
  Okay.
  
  that I had held for many years
  
  Alright
  
  not long after he took over Tesla.
  
  Lol. No, you didn’t.
  
  Why even make that up. So obviously untrue.
  
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  - realitista@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I meant to write “after he sold Twitter”. Fixed.
    
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MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Every great genius inventor and businessman can be a little eccentric. Remember that before you decide to call them mean names like “abuser”, “megalomaniac” etc. It’s actually quirky and endearing once you factor in that he’s a genius inventor and businessman (I’m also one of the misunderstood people in the same category).

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nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I love this. I’m a former IT engineer/CTO turned renegade entrepreneur, so this story tickles both of my feet.

Yeah, any reasonable person would know this idea to move the servers without a plan was ridiculous.

Yet as a roll-up-the-sleeves entrepreneur your entire job is to fucking destroy the red tape that is put up in front of you constantly. Or else you and everyone who works for you is out of a job. Of course there will be problems, but that’s why you have smart people who can sort it out afterwards faster than they can preplan for it.

And a lot of really smart people make “doing it the right way” a religion, which when the cash is going to run out shortly, well, sometimes the big guy needs to just toss the dice.

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