After Elon Musk’s job ultimatum, there are so few software engineers left at Twitter that industry insiders and programmers now fear the social media giant could collapse.
Core items:
- At least half of Twitter’s 7,500 full-time employees and an unknown number of contractors have already resigned or resigned
- Twitter closed its offices on Thursday without giving any reason to employees
- Elon Musk has asked “anyone who actually writes software” to fly in to meet him
The billionaire ended a very public dispute with nearly two dozen programmers critical to the stability of the microblogging platform by ordering their sacking this week.
Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they commit to “extremely hard” work or quit with severance pay by Thursday night local time.
The latest departures meant the platform lost staff as it prepared for the 2022 FIFA World Cup over the weekend.
It’s been one of Twitter’s busiest events in the past, with tweet attacks taking a heavy toll on its systems.
“It looks like he’s going to blow up Twitter,” said Robert Graham, a veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur.
“I can’t imagine the lights not going out at any moment.”
Though many of the recent Twitter departures predicted a more gradual death.
Hundreds of employees signaled they were leaving before Thursday’s deadline and posted goodbye messages, a greeting emoji or other familiar symbols on the company’s internal Slack messaging board, according to employees who still had access.
A video on social media showed a rolling projection on the side of one of Twitter’s headquarters, reportedly shown by engineers who left the company on time and branded the billionaire as a “mediocre boy child,” “melomaniac,” “parasite supreme.” and other insults.
Dozens also took to Twitter to publicly announce they were opting out.
Musk ‘not particularly concerned’ as Twitter teams gutted
Twitter leadership sent an unsigned email after Thursday’s deadline, saying offices were closed through Monday and access to employee badges was disabled.
No reason was given, according to two employees who received the email – one who took the severance pay, one who is still on the payroll. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Mr Musk appeared undeterred and had a trusted legion of Tesla programmers at his side.
“The best people stay so I’m not too worried,” he tweeted Thursday night.
But it soon became clear that some key programming teams had been thoroughly gutted.
In an indication of how strained the company was for programmers, Mr Musk sent emails to all hands on Friday inviting “anyone who actually writes software” to his command post on Twitter’s 10th floor at 2 p.m.
The email told them to fly to San Francisco if they weren’t there, said the employee, who quit Thursday but was still receiving company emails.
“It might start crashing”
After acquiring Twitter less than three weeks ago, Mr Musk laid off half of the company’s 7,500 full-time employees and an undisclosed number of contractors responsible for moderating content and other key duties.
Then came this week’s ultimatum.
Three engineers who left the company this week described to The Associated Press why they expected significant inconvenience to the more than 230 million Twitter users now that well over two-thirds of Twitter’s core services engineers are gone before Musk.
While they didn’t anticipate a near-term collapse, Twitter could get very rough around the edges — especially if the Tesla boss makes major changes outside of the platform without much testing.
Signs of fraying could be seen ahead of Thursday’s mass exit.
People reported seeing more spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages. Engineers reported dropped tweets. People were getting strange error messages.
Still, nothing important was broken. Still.
“There’s a betting pool if that happens,” said one of the engineers, who all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Mr Musk, which could affect their careers and finances.
Another said if Twitter servers were down and “high volume suddenly hits, it could crash”.
“The World Cup is the biggest event for Twitter,” he said.
“That’s the first thing you learn when you board Twitter.”
Twitter’s trending pages have already suffered from the earlier layoffs of curation staff.
The tech fireworks began Tuesday when Mr Musk announced on Twitter that he had begun shutting down “microservices” that he believed were unnecessary “bloatware.”
“Less than 20 percent is actually needed to make Twitter work!” he tweeted.
That drew objections from engineers, who told Musk he had no idea what he was talking about.
“Microservices are the way most modern large web services organize their code so software engineers can work quickly and efficiently,” said Gergely Orosz, author of the blog Pragmatic Engineer and former Uber programmer.
There are dozens of such services and each one manages a different function.
Instead of testing the microservices removal in a simulated real-world environment, Mr Musk’s team appears to have updated Twitter live on all computers.
Indeed, one microservice broke momentarily – the one that people use to verify their identity on Twitter via text message when they log in. It’s called two-factor authentication.
“You have reached the limit for SMS codes. Try again in 24 hours,” Twitter advised when a reporter tried to download his microblogging history archive.
Luckily, the alternative to email confirmation worked.
Twitter could face cascading problems if engineers leave
One of Twitter’s newly separated engineers, who had worked in core services, told the AP that engineering team clusters had gone from about 15 people before Musk — not counting team leaders, all of whom were fired — to three or four before Thursday’s resignations.
Then more institutional knowledge that couldn’t be replaced overnight left the door.
“Everything could break,” said the programmer.
It took six months to train someone to be on call for some services, the engineers said.
Such rotations required programmers to be available 24/7.
But if the person on duty was unfamiliar with the codebase, errors could cascade as they frantically trawled through reference manuals.
“If I had stayed, I would have been on call indefinitely with little support on several additional complex systems that I had no experience with,” tweeted Peter Clowes, an engineer who accepted the severance package.
“To run even relatively boring systems, you need people who know where to go when something breaks,” said Blaine Cook, Twitter’s founding engineer, who retired in 2008.
He added that it’s dangerous to drastically reduce programmers to an emergency crew without first bulletproofing the code.
“It’s like saying, ‘These firefighters aren’t doing anything. So we’re just going to fire them all,'” he said.
Engineers also feared that Mr Musk would shut down tools for moderating content and removing illegal material uploaded to Twitter — or that there simply wouldn’t be enough staff to run them properly.
Another problem was hackers.
In the past, when they breached the system, reducing damage depended on spotting them quickly and kicking them out.
It wasn’t clear how Musk’s Twitter housecleaning has affected his cybersecurity team, which suffered a major PR black eye in August when the highly respected security chief who was fired by the company earlier this year, Peiter Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint filed claiming that the platform was a cybersecurity mess.
“A lot of the security infrastructure of a large organization like Twitter resides in people’s minds,” said Graham, the cybersecurity veteran.
“And when they’re gone, you know, everything goes with them.”
PA
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