Bloomberg: Twitter layoffs will leave the social network vulnerable to disruption

Mass layoffs of Twitter employees after the purchase of the platform by Elon Musk will leave the social network vulnerable to failures, hacks and errors that cannot be fixed. About this with reference to expert forecasts writes Bloomberg.

Several teams that have been critical in keeping Twitter running have left the company as a whole or are hiring engineers from other teams, agency sources said. After users and resigned employees “predicted the imminent closure and said goodbye,” the hashtag #RIPTwitter began to trend, writes Bloomberg.

Engineer Glenn Hope, who worked at Facebook and Instagram and previously posted on Twitter a list of possible scenarios that could cause disruptions to the social network, described what is happening at the company as a “pretty bleak picture.”

We are not talking about an unexpected closure of the social network, however, as the agency notes, the remaining employees will probably not be able to fix errors in the code, and the site will begin to lose some functionality or become vulnerable to serious hacking.

One of the former employees of the company said that the errors that occur need to be fixed, and since Twitter is a “system with more than 1000 microservices”, there is a risk of even small errors escalating into a threat to the security and user data. Network security on a platform like Twitter rots over time as flaws in the company’s codebase are discovered and there’s no one to fix them, adds software engineer Alec Muffet. He cites account hijacking and privacy breaches as the most likely risks for Twitter, and points out that there are “far fewer” engineers left to deal with such issues. As a result, some critical system at Twitter will go down, “important parts of the site – or even the entire site – will fall,” he predicts. Among the possible threats, he calls the loss of the ability to retweet or log in.

After new Twitter owner Elon Musk pressured his employees to decide whether they want to stay and start working “intensively” or quit, hundreds of employees decided to leave the company, Bloomberg and Reuters previously reported. According to media reports, shortly before the expiration of the ultimatum, Musk was forced to meet with key employees to convince them to stay. In addition, the billionaire “softened his tone” in relation to remote work, the complete ban of which he announced earlier. As Bloomberg noted, this was not enough: the company’s internal chats are filled with “saluting” emoticons, symbolizing the employee’s decision to leave the company. At the same time, Twitter management decided to close offices until Monday.

In his letter to employees, Musk earlier notedthat they “would need to be extremely powerful” to create a “breakthrough Twitter 2.0” and that it would take long hours at high intensity to succeed. The businessman emphasized that Twitter will be much more focused on engineering development, and employees who write “great code” will make up the majority of the team. Musk asked workers to click “yes” on the link provided in the email if they wanted to be part of the “new Twitter”.

On October 27, Musk closed the acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion. After that, the company underwent a number of changes: Musk dissolved the board of directors of Twitter, fired Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde. The businessman also promised to unblock the pages of some users who became inaccessible due to the disagreement of the company’s employees with their statements.