There are concerns about Twitter's stability after core engineers were let go. File image. Photo: AFP
By Tom Williams
Analysis - Tech industry insiders and experts are concerned about the stability and security of Twitter, after the social media giant shed many of its core engineers.
Hundreds of workers quit this week after Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, demanded they commit to an "extremely hardcore" work environment or resign with severance pay. Thousands of others had already been sacked.
Hashtags such as #RIPTwitter, #twittershutdown and #twittermigraton have trended since, with some former employees sharing their experiences on the very platform they've either left or been fired from.
There are questions about whether a smaller team can keep such a huge platform afloat, and users are already seeing parts of the site fraying at the edges.
With the FIFA World Cup expected to send Twitter traffic peaking in the coming weeks, is the platform actually at the risk of breaking? And what could happen if it does start to fall apart?
World Cup a 'natural opportunity' for hackers to target Twitter
A current Twitter employee told Business Insider that "outages of some kind" were almost certain during the FIFA World Cup, which is a major event on the platform.
The world record for the 'Most discussed sports event on Twitter' belongs to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, which allegedly prompted 672 million tweets.
Paul Haskell-Dowland, a professor of cyber security at Edith Cowan University, said the World Cup is "a natural opportunity" for hackers to target Twitter, as the service is expected to be under stress when it sees spikes in demand.
Elon Musk is Twitter's new chief executive. Photo: AFP
"The absence of people to look after it could result in impacts on service availability," he said.
"Cybercriminals around the world will be well aware of the challenges that the Twitter platform is currently facing."
He said hackers were likely considering attempting Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, which flood a site with too much traffic, or even trying to compromise Twitter accounts using vulnerabilities in the platform.
It wasn't clear how much Twitter's cybersecurity teams had been impacted by recent lay-offs and resignations, but earlier this year its former security chief, Peiter Zatko, filed a whistle-blower complaint claiming the platform's cybersecurity was in a dire state.
Twitter users noticing more bugs, spam and scams
Some Twitter users have seen an increase in bugs on the platform in recent weeks, as well as more spam and scam content, and issues with Two-Factor Authentication when logging in.
Downdetector, a service which tracks website outages, has flagged in multiple countries in recent days that "user reports indicate possible problems at Twitter".
Three engineers who left Twitter this week told the Associated Press that they expected the platform's 230 million users to experience some unpleasantness now that more than two-thirds of the company's pre-Musk core services engineers were gone.
One said there was "a betting pool" for predicting when critical aspects of the site would start to break.
On Tuesday, Musk announced he had started shutting down "micro-services" he considered unnecessary "bloatware" on the platform.
"Less than 20 percent are actually needed for Twitter to work," he said.
Could Twitter actually break?
Haskell-Dowland said we were likely to see "a degradation" of Twitter, but not the platform's death.
"I would be very surprised if we were to see a complete failing of the platform. But it will certainly almost inevitably lose some level of functionality," he said.
"It will probably suffer with unavailability for prolonged periods of time, probably during major events - and the World Cup would be a natural one - but it would survive."
Because Twitter is a large, cloud-based platform spread across many servers around the world, Haskell-Dowland said there were many complex systems to maintain to keep it functioning properly, and it needed a large team of people to do that work.
"The systems are generally quite reliable, but there is a very large team of people sitting behind the scenes, keeping an eye on things," he said.
"And I think that's where we're going to start to see the problems that whilst the systems may be generally reliable, they're not perfect."
A now-former Twitter engineer wasn't as optimistic, and told the Associated Press that "everything could break" now that some engineering teams allegedly consisted of only three or four people.
Peter Clowes, an engineer who resigned from Twitter, tweeted that while some people thought the site would collapse, he thought it was a "maybe" but wasn't entirely sure.
Musk has posted emoji of a laughing face on Twitter to shrug off suggestions that the platform may collapse, and shared photos from a meeting with company engineers.
What could happen if Twitter begins to fail?
Haskell-Dowland said there was the risk of a major data breach at Twitter if not enough workers were available to detect issues with the platform.
"If we see something on the scale of Optus or Medibank - if that were to hit the the Twitter platforms and there'd be no one around to stop it or detect it and mitigate the issue, then it's quite possible you could see a major data leak for the likes of Twitter," he said.
Software engineer Gergely Orosz, who has previously worked for Uber, Skype and Microsoft, wrote that for Twitter, the worst case scenario would see the site go down "for days".
He said this was "very unlikely, but in the realm of possibilities", and would possibly see the site lose some data before getting things working again.
The best case scenario, according to Orosz, would see Twitter experience "small outages for weeks", as the company attempts to hire new people and avoid major outages.
He also said there was a chance for security breaches to take place, which could lead to more regulatory scrutiny.
Google software engineer François Chollet said the main risk was not Twitter going down, but a weakening of its ability to address issues with things such as moderation, security, bots, scammers and site reliability.
"You don't know when it will crop up. But when it does, good luck," he said.
'There's no clear replacement' for Twitter
Some Twitter users have already left the platform since Musk's takeover, and while competitors such as Mastodon have reported a swell of new sign-ups, Twitter is still seen as an important part of the internet's social infrastructure.
Social media researcher Anjana Susarla from Michigan State University wrote in The Conversation that "if Twitter were to collapse, there's no clear replacement in sight".
She posted that "if Twitter were to go under, the loss would reverberate around the world", as data from the platform is routinely used for important things such as detecting security threats, sharing information in emergencies, and open source intelligence and fact-checking - as seen amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Haskell-Downland said Twitter remained an important platform, and any issues with its service "would have a massive impact" for corporations, governments and individual users.
"A lot of people do use it as a source of information and news, and do rely upon it for communications," he said.
"So it will have a massive impact if it completely disappears."
- ABC
