Twitter employees shared data showing Musk’s engagement declining.
Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.
A principal engineer stepped forward to explain that the decline may be due to easily chartable waning public interest in Musk. To back up the engineer, Twitter employees provided internal data that corresponded with a Google Trends chart, Platformer reported.
They also shared the results of an investigation into Twitter’s algorithm, which found “no bias” against the CEO. None of this seemed to satisfy Musk, whose immediate response was to remove the employee who suggested that since Musk’s move to purchase Twitter last April, people have been increasingly uninterested in following all of Musk’s moves online.
“You’re fired,” Musk told the engineer, whom Platformer did not name due to concerns that the engineer could face online harassment.
Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Ongoing chaos for Twitter engineers
It’s hard to determine how many engineers are still employed at Twitter since Musk took over, but last month, CNBC reported that internal records showed that the platform employed just 550 full-time engineers. Musk took issue with CNBC’s reporting but did not directly dispute the reported number of full-time engineers.
One former engineer told CNBC that because the company’s code base is massive, “it requires knowledge of different platforms and programming languages to maintain different parts of Twitter.” That means skill sets are not necessarily transferrable between teams, the former engineer said, noting that Musk would struggle to quickly train engineers to take over responsibilities of all the abruptly dismissed engineers who had “so much institutional knowledge.” Reducing the staff so heavily would surely make it harder for the engineers left at Twitter to “maintain the service reliably while still building new features,” the engineer predicted.
On Wednesday, as Twitter rolled out its new 4,000-character limit feature for Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter finally broke. The global outage prevented users from tweeting, sending direct messages, or following accounts. Former engineers told Fast Company that the more unreliable the platform becomes, the more likely it will be for advertisers to abandon the platform, as they worry “there’s no way they can trust Twitter to be online to broadcast their message.” That could lead to even more revenue loss.
For its report, Fast Company reviewed conversations among former Twitter engineers who said that right now, Twitter’s remaining engineers are working in a state of ongoing chaos. The former engineers say they’re in contact with existing Twitter staff who say that Musk is forcing them to instigate frequent code freezes, which stops them from gradually deploying iterative changes to the codebase. That means “vast volumes of code changes are pushed out at once when they do happen—so if anything goes wrong, it’s difficult to unpick what’s to blame,” Fast Company reported.
Musk has vaguely tweeted to confirm that the global outage on Wednesday was due to “multiple internal & external issues.” But former engineers told Fast Company that it sounds like “Twitter cannot identify what caused the most recent outage because it has tried to push out too many new code changes at once, and it’s impossible to identify which of the changes caused the issue.”
Platformer provided another explanation for one of the Twitter glitches Wednesday. It seems that a Twitter employee accidentally “deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter,” which is why many users were wrongly blocked from tweeting and told it was because they had reached their daily limit for tweets.
FTC to audit Twitter soon
The tension between Musk and Twitter engineers, according to Platformer’s report, comes as engineers fear they could be fired if they give Musk an answer he doesn’t like. In addition to the engineer fired this week, Musk has fired three Twitter employees who criticized him on the platform, Business Insider reported.
The more engineers Twitter loses, the less legacy knowledge is left and the more strained Twitter teams become—trying under Musk’s watchful eye to learn new roles, maintain a stable platform, and roll out new features. But Musk isn’t the only one monitoring their progress.
According to Platformer, the Federal Trade Commission will be conducting an audit of Twitter this quarter. Ars couldn’t reach the FTC to confirm when that audit will happen, but Wired reported that Twitter’s initial assessment of the platform’s vulnerabilities, including data privacy and security issues, was due in January. Twitter is also “required to carry out vulnerability testing every four months, privacy and security risk assessments every year, and get an independent security audit every two years for a decade,” Wired reported.
Current employees told Platformer they aren’t sure if Twitter is prepared to pass the FTC’s inspection or if Musk is even motivated to try.
“His stance is basically ‘fuck you, regulators,’” a current employee told Platformer.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
