Slowly, Then Suddenly: How Products Fail

Yesterday Twitter broke for several hours: Links weren’t working, images disappeared, and TweetDeck went down. Twitter has been a pervasive part of our world for many years, almost in spite of itself. But the product is now fraying—will a drop in users follow? 

So far, the answer seems to be no. We’re all still tweeting despite the service interruptions. But there’s reason to believe that might not go on forever. This seemed like a good time to resurface one of our favorite posts from last year: Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business.

In it, Gareth Edwards argues that you can degrade the experience of successful consumer products for some period of time without seeing any corresponding drop in growth or retention rate. However, if you push things too far you’ll pass a critical threshold—a trust thermocline—where usage collapses.

Is Twitter close to breaching a trust thermocline? Decide for yourself.

---

In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic.