Meaning
A slogan favouring speed over caution: ship quickly, accept that things will break, and fix them later. Began as Facebook's internal engineering motto, then became shorthand for Silicon Valley's disruption ethos, and is now used either to celebrate rapid iteration or to criticise reckless speed in tech and beyond. Now usually ironic or critical when used outside outright startup celebration. Regional use: General English; originated in and strongest within US tech culture.
Origin
The phrase is strongly identified with Facebook's early years and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who described it in a 2009 Business Insider interview as his prime instruction to developers, on the logic that breaking things proved you were moving fast enough. Exactly when Facebook adopted the motto internally is not clearly documented, and that gap should be stated plainly. As Facebook matured into a platform other businesses depended on, the cost of breakage grew, and at the F8 conference on 30 April 2014 Zuckerberg announced the internal motto had been changed to 'Move fast with stable infrastructure' (reported by Business Insider on 2 May 2014), conceding the new line was less catchy. The original survived as the era's signature phrase, celebrated through the 2000s and 2010s and increasingly criticised during the tech backlash.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- move fast and break stuff
- move fast with stable infra
- move quickly and break things
Usage Examples
- The startup's move-fast-and-break-things attitude shipped features quickly and left a trail of angry users.
- You can move fast and break things with a side project, but not with medical records.
- After the outage, the team traded move fast and break things for boring, careful releases.