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Which employees does Twitter actually need?

    The layoffs of more than 1,000 Twitter employees this week included many who kept the site running smoothly and protected from hackers. Their departure sparked a wave of hand-wringing over whether the site will continue to operate properly.

    Twitter is unlikely to experience a sudden crash, many tech experts said. But the company could face more outages, slow uploads and hacks.

    “The site can work fine for a while, just like driving a car for thousands of miles with the check engine light on,” said David Thiel, chief technologist at the Stanford Internet Observatory and former security officer at Meta. . “Except in this case, people who knew what that light meant and how to service this particular model are gone.”

    Here are some of the social media tasks required to keep the services running.

    At the heart of Twitter are the engineers who built and manage the core architecture, also known as the platform. They keep the site running smoothly for users and help manage the hundreds of thousands of servers where all tweets, DMs, followers, and likes are stored.

    Before Elon Musk took over last month, thousands of these engineers worked at Twitter. It is unclear how many are left.

    Many are software engineers whose job it is to make sure the site loads reliably and is stable enough to add features and users. Twitter has had a “blob storage” team, which helps manage the storage of all videos, photos, and other content. A “caching” request team ensures that stored content can be loaded quickly. A “graph” team tracks and maintains databases about who users follow. Those teams have been drastically reduced.

    There are also employees who manage the physical installations, including data centers that each house hundreds of thousands of servers. For example, these technicians are on the ground at the Sacramento data center, addressing any disruptions such as a server failure and are expected to quickly resolve other issues that could slow down the site.

    Twitter has a collection of engineers, product managers, communications officers, and people from the business and revenue operations who respond to emergencies. The group, known as the command center, assigns each incident – a hack, slow delivery, outages – a severity level, with zero as the worst problem. All zero incidents are reported to executive management.

    On some busy days hundreds of notifications come in. The World Cup football tournament, which starts this weekend, is expected to cause a major increase in traffic – and likely many instances of abuse, misinformation, disruptions and delays.

    Members of the internal security, trust and safety teams are responsible for detecting threats from foreign adversaries and removing hateful and false content from the site.

    Before taking over the company, Mr. Musk that he wanted less moderation on the site. But since then he has become a bit more ambiguous. On Friday, Mr. Musk that “negative/hate tweets are deboosted and demonetized to the max, so no ads or other revenue for Twitter” – suggesting the site might have its software to make some posts less visible in people’s feeds.

    Katie Harbath, a former Meta policy officer, said Musk would face pressure from world leaders who spread disinformation and try to control speech online.

    In addition, Twitter needs global regulatory experts to negotiate with governments. “The question is what is the near-term risk of a regulator shutting it down,” Ms Harbath said. “In the US and Europe that would take a while. Somewhere like India or Brazil I see it happening sooner.”

    Mr. Musk is looking for ways to generate new sources of income for Twitter. But as of now, it’s basically all from ads. The business model is under fire as advertisers pull out of contracts to showcase their goods on the platform, saying they are concerned about the wave of toxic content on Twitter led by Mr Musk.

    In addition, the revenue team responsible for ad sales has been affected by the exodus. These individuals are not responsible for mission-critical operations of the technology, but without them the company cannot survive financially.