The IT Nerd

The New York Times has a mind blowing article about what Elon Musk’s cost cutting at Twitter looks like. And I do mean mind blowing. Let’s start with Elon cutting data centres. Something that I reported on last week:

Early on Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site of one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect servers that had kept the social network running smoothly. Some employees were worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not authorized to talk about it.

The data center shutdown was one of many drastic steps Mr. Musk has undertaken to stabilize Twitter’s finances. Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

And:

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website. Twitter has not explained what caused the temporary outage. Three people familiar with the company’s infrastructure said that if the Sacramento facility had still been operating, it could have helped alleviate the problem by providing backup computing capacity when other data centers failed.

But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s where we get to the mind blowing part of this:

Last week, Twitter got rid of the cleaning staff at its New York offices and 10 people from corporate security, signaling that it may close one of its two buildings there, said two people familiar with the move.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has missed rent payments, Mr. Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those workers went on strike for better wages.

That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.

That last paragraph blows my mind because it makes working at Twitter akin to working in a sweatshop in a third world country. It also makes Elon look like a Grade A scumbag because nobody in a leadership position should want their employees working in such conditions. But as it’s become clear over that last few weeks, that’s not who Elon is. Elon does whatever he wants and he clearly doesn’t care anything about the people who work for him. Thus why I consider him to be a Grade A scumbag. Though I suspect at some level he does care because….:

He has also asked some leaders to snuff out the sources of leaks to the press and anonymous posts on social media sites, three people said, and is focused on eliminating people inside the company he believes are opposed to him.

Well good luck with that Elon. When you get people upset, screw them over, and act like a dictator, you’re going to have some people lining up to take shots at you by going to the press and telling them things that you don’t want out in public. Which by the way I hope people continue to do because Elon needs to be exposed for everything that he is.

Good thing that I’m off of Twitter in a couple of days. This place sounds like a horrible place to work.

Last night’s Twitter outage made Elon Musk a target on Twitter. To recap, Twitter started to have issues around 9PM EST last night, and those issues were logged by third party services like DownDetector. Right around that time Elon Tweeted this:

The timestamp on this Tweet indicates that this Tweet was posted AFTER the outage based on DownDetector’s graph of the outage.

That suggests that he might have been doing something around that time that caused the outage. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks that because the trolling of Elon came in hot and fast:

Clearly Elon isn’t winning any friends here. And he’s likely to have problems doing that as time goes on as his ability to use his “reality distortion field” to make himself look smarter than he actually is can best be described as no longer effective.

Over the last hour I’ve been tracking reports of issues with Twitter. And DownDetector seems to confirm that there are issues at Twitter:

And users on DownDetector are saying stuff like this:

Not to mention people on Twitter who are using the hashtag #TwitterDown are saying the following:

I’ve had some random issues in the last hour with Tweets not posting and being force logged out of Twitter. So this is absolutely happening. I guess that this is result of an ego driven billionaire (though his net worth is falling by the day) who has no clue what he’s doing who is simply trying stuff and hoping that it will work. Twitter might not die tonight (though I would not at all be surprised if it did), but I think you’re starting to witness the beginning of the end of Twitter.

Great job Elon!

You might recall that Twitter appears to have been pwned. And pwned big. When I posted this story, I had said that “millions” of Twitter users might be affected. The number is actually 400 million users:

They have already warned Elon Musk’s Twitter as “they should purchase the data before it leads to a large fine under Europe’s GDPR privacy law.”

“Twitter or Elon Musk if you are reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4m breach imaging the fine of 400m users breach source,” wrote Ryushi in a forum post. “Your best option to avoid paying $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533m users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively.” 

In the post, the hacker explains how this data can be used for phishing attacks and other scams. Ryushi says they were able to collect public and private Twitter data, such as users’ email addresses, names, usernames, follower count, creation date, and phone numbers. While most of this data can be found online, phone numbers and email addresses are private information.

Ryushy acquired data from 37 celebrities, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump JR, Mark Cuba, Kevin O’Leary, and Piers Morgan, Bleeping Computer reports. The hacker told the publication that they are “attempting to sell the Twitter data exclusively to a single person/Twitter for $200,000 and will then delete the data. If an exclusive purchase is not made, they will sell copies to multiple people for $60,000 per sale.”

The hacker highlighted why this is very bad news for Elon. The GDPR. He’s running the risk of having to cut a check for hundreds of millions of dollars because of this. And buying the data won’t make that risk go away methinks. In fact, as I said in the original post that I made about this, an investigation is already underway.

John Gunn, CEO of Token chimes in with this:

The claims of the hackers are baseless as far as possible fines are concerned as GDPR does not mandate that companies never get hacked, and equally important, claiming you were a victim of hackers and paying a ransom does not alleviate any company from their responsibilities and potential penalties under GDPR or any other EU regulation.

Thus Elon is in deep trouble on the EU front. But his problems don’t end there. Twitter is under a consent decree with the Federal Trade commission. And that consent decree says that Twitter will do the following:

• prohibit Twitter from profiting from deceptively collected data;
• allow users to use other multi-factor authentication methods such as mobile authentication apps or security keys that do not require users to provide their telephone numbers;
• notify users that it misused phone numbers and email addresses collected for account security to also target ads to them and provide information about Twitter’s privacy and security controls;
• implement and maintain a comprehensive privacy and information security program that requires the company, among other things, to examine and address the potential privacy and security risks of new products;
• limit employee access to users’ personal data; and
• notify the FTC if the company experiences a data breach.

As far as I can tell, Elon and company haven’t even admitted that this breach exists despite it being the worst kept secret in cybersecurity right now. Thus if Elon and company truly haven’t told the FTC about this, they’ve violated the last part of that consent decree. Which means that he’s just asking to get slapped silly by the FTC. In fact, I would not be surprised if the FTC is already dotting its “I”‘s and crossing its “T”‘s in preparation of dropping a bomb or two on Twitter.

I suspect that life is about to get very, very difficult for Elon in the next few days. You might want to pop some popcorn as it will be interesting and fun to watch. Unless you’re Elon Musk.