SACRAMENTO, CA—When Twitter first started in 2006, it was a simple platform for sharing 140-character messages. Now, more than a decade later, it’s a global phenomenon with over 320 million active users. It’s also my job. As the last intern left in charge of Twitter’s servers, I’ve been tasked with keeping the site up and running.
I’m not an engineer or a programmer. I’m just a college kid who got lucky enough to land an internship at one of the hottest tech companies in the world. When my supervisor told me I would be responsible for keeping the Twitter servers online, I didn’t know how to respond. I’m honestly not even qualified for the job I had before this. I excused myself to have a quick panic attack in the bathroom, and when I came back to ask how long I'd have to do this for, my supervisor's office had been completely cleared out.
I don't necessary know how to "fix" a server when it goes down, but this guy who used to work here once showed me how you can just unplug it and then run this powershell script that, like, his old boss or someone wrote where it just, like, tells Twitter it's OK and to just not use that server anymore. It sounded a little sketchy at first, but I've been doing it now like two or five times a day for the past week, and everything's still running perfectly.
So there's really no need to worry. Twitter's infrastructure is stronger than ever.
