The era of Twitter may end under the leadership of Elon Musk
The era of Twitter may end under the leadership of Elon Musk
2022.11.19 09:22
The era of Twitter may end under the leadership of Elon Musk
Budrigannews.com – Twitter a mass exodus of employees leaves the platform vulnerable to a wide range of malfunctions. Social networks will succumb to major glitches in some ways, the 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 the month, through layoffs and resignations. Musk this week asked employees to sign on or leave for a more “hardcore” version of their job.
According to a person familiar with the matter, several teams that were critical to keeping the service up and running either completely disappeared or borrowed engineers from other groups, which included an infrastructure team to keep the main feed operational and keep the Tweet database up and running. RIPTwitter tended on the site as users and departing employees predicted an impending shutdown and said their farewell.
The amount of knowledge lost in the “pretty dark” tribe is simply staggering, perhaps unprecedented, according to Glenn Hope, an engineer who worked on Facebook and instagram.
That does not mean that Twitter will shut down completely unexpectedly. Perhaps the rest of the employees will not be able to fix code problems, and the site will begin to lose some functionality or become vulnerable to major hacks, and in general, the computer server will not run on autopilot. Platforms like Twitter need all kinds of software to keep it running- people have a backup that stores billions of tweets.
The complexity of these systems may require constant tweaks, maintenance, and institutional knowledge of the way things are set, meaning that if small bugs are not fixed, they spiral into big bugs- and Twitter is a system with more than 1,000 microservices, never to be named to talk about internal problems. One former Twitter employee, who declined to comment, said. You need to patch bugs or spiral into user security and data threats.
Chester Wisniewski, senior research fellow at cybersecurity firm Sophos Ltd, says it can be even more complicated if the software is built in a hurry or under less ideal circumstances. “It’s a nightmare scenario for most companies, especially tech companies,” Wisniewski said.
Network security on platforms like Twitter is a natural thing to rot over time, according to Alec Muffett, a software engineer who has worked in host and network security for over 30 years, including Facebook.Alec Muffett, who has worked in host and network security for over 30 years, including Facebook, says flaws in the company’s code base have been discovered and no one can fix them quickly.
The most plausible risks to Twitter’s network security, he said, are account robberies and privacy breaches. Also, there is a risk that Twitter’s critical system will crash because there are far fewer engineers left in the company to solve operational problems. “A significant part of the site, or even the entire site, will fall over, like a table that loses its legs,” says Muffett. Users may lose the ability to retweet or log in, for example.
If the site is unreliable, people may give up using it. Advertisers may also lose confidence that the promotions they are paying for are about to appear in front of the right people, further threatening Twitter’s financial future.
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According to hope, there are other concerns beyond keeping the site available. With fewer employees, Twitter can lead to content takedown requests from foreign governments, physical security in its data centers, and a surge in traffic, which can lead to system failures.
Then there is the problem of harm to the user. As Muffett said, if there are not enough adults in the room to constrain the poor behavior of some users, it can lead to a surge in trending content and abuse, further alienating visitors and advertisers.
Many of the company’s trust and safety team declined to continue hiring on Twitter past Musk’s deadline of Thursday employees, according to people familiar with the matter, and about half of the company’s information operations team and threat disruption team also resigned. This means that Twitter’s global audience, including the entire Asia-Pacific region, will not be able to respond without moderation of content, except for contractors hired to assist with spam in the Korean market.
On Thursday night, shortly after hundreds of Twitter employees resigned from the company, the website Downdetector.Twitter, which has been gathering reports that the com website is not working, showed a surge in outages. According to data on the Downdetector website, the problem continued Friday.
Musk, meanwhile, posted late Thursday night that the site had “just hit a record high in Twitter usage.””
Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and media analyst, said that while it is likely that more people are using Twitter these days, it is not necessarily a sign of sustained growth. “The analogy people use is rubbernecking, like traffic accidents and train accidents, and we’ve seen similar activity on platforms like Twitter when crises arise,” he added, adding that there was no evidence of “quality” or “sustainability” of growth on the platform, regardless of what Musk was saying.
And for hope, the former Facebook engineer, Twitter’s path without catastrophe, “looks narrower and grows narrower by the day.””
“Twitter is a public square, for good or bad,” he said. “There’s nothing like it and I don’t think anyone will win by losing it.”
