Industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree that Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has reduced the number of software engineers who operate the world’s de facto public square: Twitter may soon deteriorate to the point where it could crash.

This week, Musk fired nearly two dozen coders crucial to the microblogging platform’s stability after a very public argument. After he demanded that they promise to work “extremely hardcore” by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay, hundreds of engineers and other workers quit.

Thanks to the most recent departures, the platform is losing employees as it prepares for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which begins on Sunday. When tweet surges put a significant strain on its systems, it is one of Twitter’s busiest events.

Veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur Robert Graham stated, “It does look like he’s going to blow up Twitter.” Even though numerous recent resignations from Twitter predicted a more gradual demise, “I can’t see how the lights won’t go out at any moment.”

According to employees who still have access to the company’s internal Slack messaging board, hundreds of employees indicated that they would be leaving before the deadline of Thursday by posting farewell messages, a salute emoji, or other familiar symbols there. Additionally, dozens of them publicly announced their departure via Twitter.

Before the week, some lashed out at Musk’s apparent carelessness that they took to Twitter to affront the Tesla and Space X President. ” Kiss my butt, Elon,” one architect said, adding lipstick marks. She had lost her job. After the deadline on Thursday, Twitter’s leadership sent an unsigned email announcing that its offices would be closed and employee badge access would be disabled until Monday. According to two employees who received the email—one who accepted the severance pay and one who remained on the payroll—no explanation was provided. Fearing retribution, they spoke on condition of anonymity.

Musk didn’t seem to be bothered, a trusted group of Tesla coders by his side as he sacked the once-comfortable workspace. “The best individuals are remaining, so I’m not stressed,” he tweeted Thursday night. However, it quickly became evident that important programming teams had been completely gutted. Elon Musk sent all-hands emails on Friday at 2 p.m. to summon “anyone who writes software” to his command perch on Twitter’s 10th floor. He asked that they fly into San Francisco if they were not local, according to an employee who quit on Thursday but was still receiving company emails. This was an indication of how strapped Musk is for programmers.

Elon Musk fired half of the company’s 7,500 full-time employees and an uncountable number of contractors who were in charge of content moderation and other crucial tasks shortly after taking over Twitter. Then, at that point, came the current week’s final offer.

Three departing engineers explained to The Associated Press why they anticipate significant discomfort for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of its core services engineers from before Mushroom has left the company. Even though they don’t anticipate a collapse shortly, Twitter could become very rough around the edges, especially if Musk makes major changes without much testing outside of the platform.

Before the mass departure on Thursday, fraying was evident. On their feeds and in direct messages, users reported seeing more spam and scams. Engineers reported tweets dropping. Strange error messages were sent to people. Nevertheless, nothing essential has failed. Yet. “There’s a wagering pool for when that occurs,” expressed one of the specialists, every one of whom talked about a state of obscurity because of a paranoid fear of counter from Musk that could influence their vocations and funds.

Please use the tools for sharing that can be found by clicking the share button at the top or side of the article. It is against FT.com’s terms and conditions and copyright policy to share articles. Using the gift article service, subscribers can share up to ten or twenty articles per month. Twitter is becoming less interesting as a product. Twitter’s user experience has significantly deteriorated despite all the glitches, bugs, and outages. Musk’s “For You” tab, which was selected by an algorithm and launched in January, resembles other social media platforms in that it contains a lot of pictures, videos, and other content that is ready to go viral and may be addictive but also completely devoid of substance. Instagram is already available for that.

Additionally, Twitter has stopped allowing third-party apps to freely access its data, which means that the majority of these apps are no longer available. Third-party apps have been an essential component of Twitter’s development as well as the user experience.

Additionally, even though advertisements appear to be appearing significantly more frequently than in the past, numerous advertisers have fled, resulting in a decline in revenue. Users may appear to be following them: A data intelligence company called SimilarWeb claims that Twitter’s total traffic decreased by 2% in January year over year. Although the complete set of data for February has not yet been made available, traffic was down 5% in the 28 days leading up to February 25.

It could have felt like it was strong at a certain point, however, Twitter was never going to keep going forever the organisational impact that has kept us all on the stage as of not long ago was continuously going to give way to one more organization eventually. We can’t just blame Musk for Twitter’s demise when it does come to pass. However, we can blame him for making it so difficult.