Musk’s Twitter teeters on edge after another 1,200 leave

>>NEW YORK: Elon Musk sent a flurry of emails to Twitter employees Friday morning with a plea.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today,” he wrote in a two-paragraph message, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Thanks, Elon.”

About 30 minutes later, Mr Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack”, a term used to describe a company’s software and related systems. Then, in another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco to meet in person.

Twitter is teetering on the edge as Mr Musk remakes the company after buying it for US$44 billion last month. The billionaire has pushed relentlessly to put his imprint on the social media service, slashing 50% of its workforce, firing dissenters, pursuing new subscription products and delivering a harsh message that the company needs to shape up or it will face bankruptcy.

Now the question is whether Mr Musk, 51, has gone too far. On Thursday, hundreds of Twitter employees resigned after he gave them a deadline to decide whether to leave or stay. So many workers chose to depart that Twitter users began questioning whether the site would survive.

Some internal estimates showed that at least 1,200 full-time employees resigned Thursday. Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October, which dropped to 3,700 after mass layoffs this month.

But the billionaire Friday tweeted what he said would be changes to Twitter’s content policy. Hateful tweets will no longer be promoted algorithmically in users’ feeds, he said, but they will not be taken down. He also reinstated several previously banned accounts, including those of comedian Kathy Griffin and author Jordan Peterson, and posted a poll asking users to vote on whether Twitter should reinstate former president Donald Trump’s account.

One team known as Twitter Command Center, a 20-person organisation crucial to preventing outages and technology failures during high-traffic events, had multiple people from around the world resign. The “core services” team, which handles computing architecture, was cut to four people from more than 100.

“Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80% of the remaining were gone,” Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer, tweeted Thursday. “3/75 engineers stayed.” He said on Twitter that he quit Thursday.

Twitter is still operating, but it may be harder to fix serious issues. One ex-Twitter engineer likened the service’s state to Wile E Coyote, the Looney Tunes character, as he runs off a cliff.

“The larger and more prominent a platform is, the more care and feeding is needed to keep it running and maintain the expectations of the users,” said Richard Forno, assistant director at the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“It’s a huge challenge,” he acknowledged.