Twitter staff’s wipeout under Musk spurs fear site will decay

Twitter Inc.’s mass exodus of employees leaves the platform vulnerable to a broad range of malfunctions. The social network will succumb to a major glitch at some point, technologists predict. It’s just a matter of when.

The social network’s staff has shrunk to a fraction of its size since Elon Musk took over at the end of October, through layoffs and resignations. Musk this week asked employees to sign on to a more “hardcore” version of their jobs or leave; astonishing numbers opted out.

Multiple teams that were critical for keeping the service up and running are completely gone, or borrowing engineers from other groups, according to people familiar with the matter. That includes infrastructure teams to keep the main feed operational and maintain tweet databases. #RIPTwitter trended on the site, as users and departed employees predicted an imminent shutdown and said their goodbyes.

“It’s a pretty dark picture,” said Glenn Hope, an engineer who worked at Facebook and Instagram and who earlier tweeted a list of possible scenarios that could cause failures on the social network. “The amount of tribal knowledge lost is simply staggering, possibly unprecedented.”

That doesn’t mean that Twitter will shut down completely and unexpectedly. More likely, remaining employees will be unable to fix issues in the code and the site will start to lose some functionality, or be vulnerable to a major hack, technologists said. In general, computer servers don’t run on autopilot. A platform like Twitter requires all sorts of software to keep it running — from the front-end website that people scroll to the back-end databases that store billions of tweets — and can be stressed during major global events like this weekend’s World Cup.