Elon Musk’s Twitter teeters on the brink after another 1,200 leave

Elon Musk sent a deluge of emails to Twitter employees on Friday morning with a plea.

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

About 30 minutes later, Mr. Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn more 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 headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person.

Twitter is teetering on the edge as Mr. Musk recreates the company after buying it for $44 billion last month. The billionaire has pushed relentlessly to make his mark on the social media service, cutting 50 percent of the workforce, firing dissenters, chasing new subscription products and sending a hard message that the company needs to take shape or it will go out of business .

Now the question is whether Mr. Musk, 51, has gone too far. On Thursday, hundreds of Twitter employees resigned en masse after Musk gave them a deadline to decide whether to leave or stay. So many employees chose to leave that Twitter users began to question whether the site would survive, tweeting farewell messages to the service and making hashtags like #TwitterMigration and #TwitterTakeover trending topics.

Some internal estimates showed that at least 1,200 full-time employees resigned Thursday, according to three people close to the company. Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October, which fell to about 3,700 after mass layoffs earlier this month.

The number of employees is likely to continue to fluctuate as the dust settles at the exits, with much confusion over who tracks employee numbers and manages other workplace systems. Some employees who quit said they separated themselves from the company by disconnecting the email and logging out of Slack’s internal messaging system because employee representatives were unavailable.

Mr Musk and Twitter representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

But the billionaire on Friday tweeted what he said would be changes to Twitter’s content policy. Hateful tweets will no longer be algorithmically promoted in users’ feeds, he said, but they will not be removed. He also reinstated several previously banned accounts, including comedian Kathy Griffin and author Jordan Peterson.

Perhaps the most crucial question now is how Twitter can keep going after the massive headcount reduction in such a short time. The effects of the cuts and layoffs have played out in the company’s technology teams, those in the know said.

A team known as Twitter Command Center, a 20-person organization critical to preventing outages and technology failures at high-traffic events, has resigned several people from around the world, two former employees said. The core services team, which deals with computer architecture, was reduced to four people from more than 100. Other teams that deal with how media appears in tweets or how profiles show the number of followers were down to zero people.

“Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80 percent of the rest was gone,” said Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer, tweeted on Thursday about the departures in his team. “3/75 engineers stayed.” He said on Twitter that he was quitting on Thursday.

Musk is also considering closing one of Twitter’s three main US data centers, a location known as SMF1 in Sacramento, California, used to store information needed to run the social media site, four people said. with knowledge of the effort. Taking the Sacramento data center offline would leave the company with data centers in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon, with potentially less backup compute capacity in case something goes down.

Twitter is still operating, but it could become more difficult for the company to address serious issues if they arise, former employees said. A former Twitter engineer compared the current state of the service to Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tunes cartoon character, running off the edge of a cliff. While he may still run in the air for a while, once he looks down, he falls like a brick.

“The bigger and more prominent a platform is, the more care and nurturing it takes to keep it running and maintain user expectations,” said Richard Forno, the deputy director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland. , Baltimore County . “It’s a huge challenge.”

The staff cuts coincide with Twitter entering one of its busiest periods in terms of site visitors. The World Cup, which begins on Sunday, is expected to bring a flood of traffic to Twitter, the fourth most visited website in the world, according to Compareweb, a digital intelligence platform that tracks web traffic. Twitter gets 6.9 billion visits each month, slightly more than Instagram’s 6.4 billion, but much less than Google, YouTube or Facebook, according to estimates from Relatedweb.

On Twitter, Mr Musk said on Thursday that he was confident the service would work out.

“The best people stay so I’m not too worried,” he tweeted.

Fortune previously reported that 1,000 to 1,200 Twitter employees had resigned. The Information previously reported on some of Twitter’s infrastructure problems. The Verge previously reported about leaving the Twitter Command Center.

Keeping a site like Twitter online is typically a job for senior engineers, who must constantly defend against cyberattacks and monitor web traffic to make sure servers aren’t overloaded, said Dr. Forno. If too many experienced employees leave, leaving Twitter without the expertise or manpower to monitor or quickly resolve issues, problems could arise, he said.

Many technical issues can be resolved remotely, but some require employees in Twitter’s data centers across the country, added Dr. Forno to it. If trouble falls through the cracks, Twitter users probably won’t see the site disappear all at once, at least at first. But timelines could refresh more slowly, the site could struggle to load, and users would find Twitter full of glitches.

“It’s like putting a car on the road, you hit the accelerator and the driver jumps out,” he said. “How far will it go before it crashes?”

On Twitter, the remaining employees on Friday said they were baffled by Mr Musk’s changing guidelines. The company had said Thursday afternoon it would close “our office buildings” and disable access to the employee badge until Monday. But in his emails on Friday, Mr. Musk seemed to want to talk to people in person at the company’s San Francisco offices.

Employees also struggled to figure out who was still employed and which parts of the infrastructure needed more support to keep things running.

An employee who wanted to resign said she spent two days looking for her manager, whose identity she couldn’t remember because so many people had left in the days before. After finally finding her direct supervisor, she handed in her resignation. The next day, her supervisor also quit.

Others spent hours trying to figure out which teams they were on. Some said they were asked to supervise tasks they had never done before.

The changes took place internally in an almost total information vacuum, according to employees. Twitter’s internal communications staff have been fired or left, and employees said they looked outside for information from media articles. Mr. Musk has increasingly downplayed the role of traditional media in recent months, calling Twitter one of the best platforms for the rise of “citizen journalism,” as he put it.

Kate Konger reporting contributed.