With the launch of Digg 4, many users were not thrilled to say the least with the changes and bugs that arose after the upgrade. Digg users went as far as sabotaging the front page having all of the links redirect to Digg"s rival, Reddit. Due to the intensity of the problems, Digg has decided to fire the VP of Engineering, John Quinn, who called for many of the changes that have now lead to unintended results.
Before Digg 4, the social news site used a MySQL database to manage the mass of data that Digg would receive. Now Digg uses the distributed database Cassandra which is suppose to be faster and scale better, however it was not tested thoroughly before launch, according to TechCrunch.
John Quinn pushed for the switch over to Cassandra at Digg, offering it as a solution to the previous setup which was having trouble coping with all of the traffic the site encountered. Due to the switch, everyone at Digg is simply trying to focus on keeping the site up and functional, and there is no clear cut solution to fix the current issues.
As of now it is not clear who will step up, or come in to replace VP of Engineering position at Digg. Facebook and Twitter both use Cassandra for portions of their social networking sites, although neither has employed it on the large scale level that Digg did.