Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing, Nov. 19 (Xinhua) although Elon Musk (Elon Musk) has been in charge of Twitter for less than a month, the social media seems to have reached a point of life and death.

Musk's violent layoffs and the voluntary departure of Twitter employees have led to the loss of a large number of employees at the company, making the platform vulnerable to all kinds of glitches. It is only a matter of time before technical experts predict that Twitter will have a major failure at some point.

Since Musk took office at the end of October, Twitter's staff has shrunk to a fraction of its original size. This week, Mr Musk asked employees to either agree to a high-intensity "hardcore" work culture or leave. As a result, a staggering number of people chose to resign.

Several teams critical to keeping Twitter running have been wiped out, or can only borrow engineers from other teams, including the infrastructure team, according to people familiar with the matter. The team is responsible for maintaining the operation of the main information flow and maintaining the tweet database.

"# RIPTwitter" went viral on Friday after Twitter users and former employees predicted the site was about to shut down.

"rest in peace, Twitter" rushed to Twitter hot search "the situation is very pessimistic", said Glenn Hope, an engineer who has worked at Facebook and Instagram, he earlier listed various situations that could lead to Twitter failure, "the loss of tribal knowledge (corporate collective wisdom) is amazing, possibly unprecedented."

Will it go bankrupt? However, that doesn't mean Twitter will be shut down unexpectedly. Technicians point out that it is more likely that the remaining employees will not be able to fix problems in the code and that the site will begin to lose some functionality or be vulnerable to major hacking attacks.

In general, computer servers do not run automatically. Platforms like Twitter need a variety of software to keep it running, from front-end sites that people scroll through to back-end databases that store billions of tweets. It may feel pressure during major global events, such as the World Cup, which opens this weekend.

The complexity of these systems means that they may require constant debugging, maintenance, and systematic understanding of how they are set up. Chester Wisniewski, chief research scientist at cyber security company Sophos, says the situation is more complicated if the software is developed in a hurry or under less-than-ideal circumstances.

"it's a nightmare for almost all companies, especially technology companies." Vesnevsky said.

Alec Muffett, a worsening software engineer, has worked in mainframe and network security for more than 30 years, as well as at Facebook. He said that over time, the network security of platforms like Twitter will naturally deteriorate, as vulnerabilities in the company's code base are discovered but no one fixes them in time. He believes that the most likely risk to Twitter's network security is that the account is taken over or the privacy is violated.

And as the number of engineers Twitter uses to solve operational problems has been greatly reduced, some of Twitter's key systems are at risk of crashing. "it's like a table without a leg, an important part of the site, or even the entire site, will fall," says Mr Moffett. For example, a user may lose the ability to forward or log in.

If a website is unreliable, people may give up using it. Advertisers may also lose confidence in whether the promotions they pay for will appear in front of the right people, which will further threaten Twitter's financial prospects.

Twitter users say they are looking for an alternative app, Hope, pointing out that there are other problems with Twitter besides keeping the site up and running. With fewer employees, Twitter may find it harder to deal with thorny issues such as content deletion requests from foreign governments, physical security in data centers, or major events that lead to a surge in traffic and further burden the system.

Then there is the problem of user harm. As Maffett said, if there are not enough adults on the platform to rein in the bad behavior of some users, this could lead to a disturbing surge of popular content and abuse, causing Twitter to further alienate visitors and advertisers.

Many people on Twitter's trust and security team refused to work at the company beyond Mr. Musk's Thursday deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. About half of the company's information operations and threat disruption team also resigned. The team is responsible for cracking down on foreign false information activities. This will deprive Twitter's global users of content censorship, including across the Asia-Pacific region, where only one contractor has been hired to help deal with spam in the South Korean market, according to people familiar with the matter.

The surge in outages local time on Thursday night, shortly after hundreds of Twitter employees resigned, Downdetector.com, which collects reports on the site's failure, showed a surge in Twitter outages that lasted until Friday.

Meanwhile, Musk posted late Thursday that the site "just hit an all-time high in Twitter usage, ".

Musk said Twitter usage hit an all-time high

Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and media analyst, said that while more people are likely to log on to Twitter in recent days, it is not necessarily a sign of Twitter's sustainable growth.

"it's like watching, like a car accident or a train accident, attracting people's attention. when the crisis occurred, we had seen similar activities on platforms such as Twitter." Navarre said. He added that no matter what Musk said, there was no evidence that the platform's growth was "high-quality" or "sustainable".

According to Hope, a former Facebook engineer, Twitter's path forward without disaster looks "narrow and narrower day by day".

"for better or worse, Twitter is a public square," he said. "there's nothing better than that. I don't think anyone will benefit from losing it."

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