TECH NEWS – Elon Musk has shaken up Twitter, whose transformation is not over under its new owner.
We’ve been following the Twitter situation in the news, but things got a little rough over the weekend. Elon Musk, the new owner, gave everyone a short deadline this week (5 PM Eastern on November 17) to agree to an “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0, and anyone who didn’t was bade farewell. After that, the mass of employees (including the core engineering team) got up from their desks and left. From an adjacent building, messages such as “Elon Musk STFU,” “Musk’s hellscape,” “Launching to bankruptcy” (the latter to have arrows pointing to the Twitter flag), and the hashtag #StopToxicTwitter were projected from a nearby building onto Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
At dawn on the 17th, we learned that, effective immediately, Twitter offices had been closed and badge access suspended without explanation. Anyone who went out the door was not allowed to return. Such was the number of people leaving that it is estimated that three quarters of the staff were removed. 75% said they would leave Twitter rather than comply with Musk’s demands. Add to this the fact that after Musk took over, he laid off nearly half of his employees, leaving around one-eighth of the original workforce!
One engineer described the state of Twitter as fragile. According to him, the situation is complex because when something goes wrong, the downtime is severe and unexpected failures (related to timing and load conditions) cause colossal damage. According to him, one should think of harmonic resonance, where even harmless sounds can break the glass. Large, long-lived systems often cannot be restarted. There’s no bootstrap in the system, so there’s a real chance that if Twitter throws in the key, it’ll go down for good.
However, we have also heard that several engineers have returned to headquarters and Twitter is still up and running today. Musk has also joked and has now called for a vote on whether the banned Donald Trump should return, citing the voice of the people…
Source: WCCFTech
Someone is projecting multiple messages onto Twitter headquarters building in SF from a neighboring building. pic.twitter.com/VuFqLvDyxT
— Gia Vang (@Gia_Vang) November 18, 2022
![However, an anonymous GOG employee paints an even darker tone of the internal situation: „We were told it’s a financial decision. GOG’s revenue couldn’t keep up with growth, the fact that we’re dangerously close to being in the red has come up in the past few months, and the market’s move towards higher [developer] revenue shares have, or will, affect the bottom line as well.](https://thegeek.games/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-gog-1-302x180.jpg)
Leave a Reply