US State Department asked Twitter to reschedule maintenance during Arab Spring
Kevin Weil · Kevin Weil: Lessons from Leading Product at Instagram & Twitter | 20VC #934 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 7, 2022 · at 28:07
Kevin Weil was formerly Head of Product at Twitter. He describes an incident during the 2011 Arab Spring where Twitter adjusted its system maintenance window following outreach from the U.S. State Department.
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“Someone from the State Department reached out, and this is a public story, so I'm not saying anything that can't be said. Someone from the State Department reached out and said, wait, wait, you can't go down at, you know, two a.m. Pacific. That's the middle of the day in Egypt, and this is a really important, Twitter's a really important tool that protesters are using on a daily basis. You, they need Twitter, you can't go down at this time. And we were like, holy cow. Like that's, you know, it just gives you this sense of the impact that a service like this is having on the world that the State Department reaches out and tells you when you're allowed to take downtime. So we actually did. We changed it. We went down in the middle of the day, Pacific time, middle of the night in, in the Middle East.”
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