Twitter shake-up came amid funding round

Now that we know Twitter is looking at term sheets, the departure of its top two engineers last week makes more sense.

The kind of service outage that struck Twitter 10 days ago is not the thing you want being debated by the blogosphere when VC firms are deciding how much they want to invest in your company.

Some heads had to roll, and Twitter VP of operations Lee Mighdoll followed CIO Blaine Cook out the door last week.

Can you just hear the conversations down on Sand Hill Road?

"You know, we love this company, and we'd like to come in at a $60 million pre-money, but what are you guys going to do about these outages?"

A quick phone call is made, Cook and Mighdoll are soon gone and now Biz Stone and the rest of the crew can compare valuation offers, which could be between $60 million and $100  million.

For some thoughts on what the outage might mean to Twitter and its rivals, we asked Brian Zisk of the San Fran Music Tech Summit for his thoughts at the Web 2.0 show last week. We also asked Medium's David Mandell about the same topic.