The IT Nerd

I have no clue what part of the Twilight Zone I’ve currently stepped into. But every time I turn around, the Twitter story gets more and more surreal. This is the latest example:

I am having a difficult time believing this is real and I am looking at the emails.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

So, based on the above and what I wrote in this story, which to be clear was written less than an hour ago, I have to assume that whatever is happening at Twitter right now is so dire, and so world ending that he’s going to more and more desperate means to try and get anyone to help him avert whatever is coming. That’s not good. Which of course is likely the understatement of the year.

I’m going to cancel my weekend plans as I get this feeling that a lot is going to happen over the weekend. And none of it will be good for Elon Musk.

Elon Musk clearly has hit rock bottom after his demand for Twitter workers to sign on to being more “hardcore” backfired. Zoë Schiffer of Platformer has posted this series of Tweets that has me simply saying WTF:

NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months" 1/

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

Again, no context as to what this is about. We know Twitter's engineering teams have been gutted by layoffs and resignations. What's next?

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

Yesterday, Twitter told employees the offices were closed and badge access was suspended until Monday. Employees are extremely confused.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

So let’s break this down:

• Twitter either has, or is about to have some sort of issue that requires Elon to reach out to any person who can write code to report to him at 2PM PST (presumably) today.
• In line with how Elon thinks, he needs you to prove your worth to him. Presumably because whatever issue that Twitter has or is going to have is so dire that in his mind, only the best people can alleviate whatever is happening or is about to happen.
• There’s zero context to this email that Elon has sent out. So this could be a big problem, or it could be a catastrophically big problem.
• Twitter employees were locked out of Twitter yesterday. So it isn’t clear how they could get back in.

Thus the only conclusion that I can come to is that the impending demise of Twitter that I predicted here is happening or is about to happen:

It would not surprise me if Twitter starts to break on Thursday when all the Twitter employees with options to go elsewhere say no to being "hardcore".

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) November 16, 2022

It will be interesting to see if anyone responds to this. Because based on my read of this situation, Elon is in deep trouble and he appears to know it.

#RIPTwitter indeed.

Business Insider is reporting that the latest from last night’s fallout from Elon Musk’s demand that staff sign onto his demand that Twitter employees be “hardcore“. It seems significant parts of Twitter’s financial groups are gone:

Along with the payroll department resigning, Twitter’s US Tax team and its financial reporting team also resigned, two people familiar with the matter said, matching several internal messages seen by Insider. All three segments of the company were part of Twitter’s finance and accounting organization. While accounting was “less impacted” by resignations on Thursday, that part of the organization is smaller now, too, one of the people said.

Employees are set to get paid again next week, one former worker said. While those payments are likely to have been already approved, the next round of payments will not have been, the person said. 

“What happens in another two weeks?” the person asked. “When everyone who can approve something is gone.”

This is not good and is the perfect example of unintended consequences. You have to wonder what Elon is thinking as he’s clearly screwed himself and Twitter along with it. I am not sure what will happen next. But I think it’s safe to say that this will further accelerate Twitter’s downfall. After all, if you can’t pay your taxes, bills, and employees, you’re going to have a problem. Or in Elon’s case, yet another problem.

Elon Musk’s power play to get employees to sign on to being “hardcore” has crashed and burned. Overnight that had the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” trending, people announcing that they were moving to other social media sites, and I noticed this on Down Detector:

The latest look at ⁦@downdetectorca⁩ shows that Twitter has serious issues. It may die outright tonight. Or it may be dying a slow death. But Twitter is clearly done.

I’m going to bed. You can find me on Mastodon @The_IT_Nerd@noc.social going forward. #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/LRDzuLQ5U2

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) November 18, 2022

Well Twitter is still alive as I type this. But for how much longer? The way I see it, there are a number of scenarios that could play out here given everything that has happened to this point. Four specific scenarios come to mind along with a bonus one:

1. Users leave Twitter taking advertisers with them: Given the events of last night, it would not at all surprise me if user engagement plummets on Twitter. Now that Twitter is a private company, it is highly likely we will never see the truth on what those numbers look like. But if user engagement drops, we’ll see that as other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon gain users. And more importantly advertisers will see that and direct their money to the places where people are which will leave Twitter out in the cold. And the lack of advertising revenue will ensure that Twitter dies a slow death.
2. Twitter gets hacked: Seeing as the key people behind Twitter’s platform security have left, this now makes Twitter a prime target for hackers. To be honest, it was highly likely that Twitter was repelling attacks long before the Elon Musk gong show. But without the key people manning the defences, it is only a matter of time before someone pwns Twitter and Twitter dies as a result from the bad press.
3. Twitter simply falls apart: From all reports, there’s a lot of people who worked at Twitter who know something that not only nobody else knows, but can’t be replicated. Having that level of institutional knowledge go out the door will be fatal for Twitter. It is probable that Twitter will limp along for weeks or perhaps months. But small things will start to break. Followed by bigger things. And with nobody who knows how any of that stuff works, it is probable that this will kill Twitter.
4. Musk uses the nuclear option: During Elon Musk’s reign as “Chief Twit”, Musk has been exposed as not being as smart as he portrays himself to be given the high profile failures of leadership that we’ve seen since he took over. And the longer that this goes on, the more his fragile ego will be unable to cope with it. So it would not shock me if he wakes up one morning and declares the whole thing bankrupt killing the platform in one go. Then Musk will try and spin it as not being his fault to save his fragile ego. Even though the world would have seen him kill the platform though his actions over the last two or three weeks.

There’s a bonus scenario for the people asking “where’s the option of Twitter surviving?” Musk and his fragile ego give up and sell Twitter to a group who can actually run the company. And that group tries to rebuild. But even if they did get Twitter stable, it won’t be anywhere near the same as it was before Elon Musk the immature billionaire took over as has already caused so much damage that I don’t think anyone can repair it. And I think that’s the point of all these scenarios. Which is Twitter as we know it is done. It is now a question of if it dies quickly, dies slowly, or stays in some sort of comatose like state never to recover.

Fun fact: I actually wrote this story at 5:30 PM today. But I sat on it even though I was already getting news of what was happening. The reason for that is that I wanted to see how Elon Musk would respond to the news that many outlets including CNBC are reporting. But as far as I can tell, he hasn’t responded. But before I pressed the publish button just after 7PM tonight, a lot did happen. Let’s start from the beginning…

Remember the demand by Elon that the 3000 or so employees that are left at Twitter had to make? As in join Twitter 2.0 and be “hardcore” or resign. It appears that employees are choosing the latter in huge numbers:

Internal Slack messages shared with CNBC showed engineers and other employees posting goodbye messages to a “watercooler” chat group in the run up to 5 p.m. ET Thursday deadline that Musk set just a day earlier. 

Hundreds of salute emojis (which convey the message “thank you for your service”) streamed by, along with dozens of goodbye messages.

Three Twitter employees who spoke with CNBC asked to remain nameless, citing fear of professional retaliation. All three were planning to resign on Thursday. It was not clear exactly how many Twitter employees resigned. 

“The train has started in #social-watercooler” one of the employees said, referring to a Slack room where Twitter employees have used in recent weeks to notify others that they are leaving.

CNN backs up the CNBC report:

Another employee exodus appears to be underway at Twitter as many workers rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to work “extremely hardcore,” choosing instead to depart the company, according to multiple current and former employees.

As the deadline approached for Twitter employees to respond to Elon Musk’s ultimatum to commit to working in an “extremely hardcore” fashion at the company or leave, some employees appeared to publicly indicate they had chosen the latter option. On Thursday afternoon, Twitter staffers began posting the salute emoji, which has become a signal that someone is exiting the company. One Twitter employee said in a tweet that deciding to join the company was “one of the easiest decisions ever made. Deciding to leave today was 100% the opposite.”

Meanwhile, an internal Slack channel at the company was filled with employees posting the salute emoji after the 5pm ET deadline, indicating they had chosen not to sign Musk’s pledge and depart the company, employees told CNN.

And:

Two Twitter employees told CNN ahead of the deadline on Thursday that they planned to reject the ultimatum, citing a toxic work environment they say the billionaire has introduced. Another Twitter employee told CNN Wednesday they were still weighing the decision, saying the email from Musk “felt like a punch in the gut because no matter how you felt about wanting to stay or wanting to go, you were forced to make a decision and feel like you’re up against the time clock to make the best decision for you and your family.”

This clearly caught Musk and his lackeys off guard as they clearly thought that people would just buy in even if they didn’t want to. Well, they called that one wrong. And now that a lot of people are leaving, and clearly those people know how Twitter works because Musk doesn’t know how Twitter works, Musk is freaking out. Thus Musk then did this:

Later on Thursday, amid an apparent scramble by management to avoid losing too many workers to the ultimatum, Musk sent an email to staff attempting to clarify his position on remote work, according to text of the email obtained by CNN from a Twitter employee who asked not to be identified. 

“Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution,” Musk said in the email, adding that workers would be expected to attend in-person meetings no less than once a month. 

Twenty minutes later, Musk sent a follow up email saying: “At risk of stating the obvious, any manager who falsely claims that someone reporting to them is doing excellent work or that a given role is essential, whether remote or not, will be exited from the company.”

At this point, Musk has nothing left to convince people that Twitter is a good place to work at. He’s burned pretty much every bridge by his erratic behaviour with no path to recover from this. I am pretty sure that we will now see Twitter enter a death spiral where the site becomes pretty unstable. Much as I predicted yesterday:

It would not surprise me if Twitter starts to break on Thursday when all the Twitter employees with options to go elsewhere say no to being "hardcore".

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) November 16, 2022

And as bad as this is. And folks, this is very very VERY bad. It gets even worse. If that’s even possible:

NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022

Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: "Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere."

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022

But wait… Isn’t Elon the one sabotaging the company? Of course he doesn’t see it that way. But the fact that he’s locked people out of their offices is just insane. There’s no other way to put it. And for the record, I have never seen this sort of situation happen before in the over quarter century that I’ve been in the tech space.

In any case, there is one person to blame for this whole situation. And that person is Elon Musk. Unless there’s a dramatic turnaround, he’s putting the final nails in Twitter’s coffin.

Congratulations Elon, you played yourself.

Clearly Elon Musk is desperate for Twitter Blue to generate some income for Twitter seeing as advertisers are fleeing the platform. According to The Verge, here’s his latest idea:

Twitter won’t let accounts less than 90 days old sign up for its Blue subscription service when it relaunches (presumably on the 29th), according to an update to the About Twitter Blue page. This means that you won’t be able to just create a new account and instantly get it verified, which could be a bid to cut down on scams and impersonator accounts like the ones that almost immediately plagued the service the first time the updated Blue launched.

The old program didn’t have a set waiting period, according to an archive of the page provided by the Wayback Machine, but it did have a warning that “Twitter accounts created on or after November 9, 2022, will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.” While that restriction clearly wasn’t going to stick around forever, it is interesting that it’s being replaced with a specific number; in theory, people could stockpile troll accounts, knowing that they’ll be able to get them verified come March.

Yeah. So what this does is move the next occurrence of this problem to March of next year. It however doesn’t actually solve the problem. Which is anyone can get a blue checkmark. Though Musk thinks he has a way around that:

Twitter will have some policies in place to try and mitigate this; CEO Elon Musk has said that changing your verified name will make you lose your check mark until Twitter confirms your new name doesn’t violate its terms of service. (Musk has also said that if you want to create a parody account, you have to say it’s a parody in the name.) The new Twitter Blue page also says that the company “may also impose waiting periods for new accounts in the future in our discretion without notice,” which does add some ambiguity back to the rules around how you can get a blue check mark.

While those restrictions should keep people from getting verified and changing their name to match whoever is trending that day, we’ve seen a lot of impersonators go after evergreen targets instead, sometimes to great effect. It’s also unclear if the system has any way to deal with someone who changes their name and handle after 90 days but before signing up for Twitter Blue or how it will adjust as the internet’s pranksters worm their way around other new restrictions, $7.99 at a time.

At this point he’s grasping at straws. The only reason why he isn’t really addressing the problem is that he’s gambling that nothing bad will happen and he can maximize the amount of cash that he can make from people who want to “flex” by having the blue checkmark next to their name. The problem is that bad things have already happened. And people who want to do everything from pranking big companies to threat actors wanting to do anything from spread misinformation to messing with elections won’t be deterred by any of this. And it absolutely won’t get advertisers back onto the platform. Though I don’t think Musk cares about that. I think at this point he’s looking for a quick win. And any quick win will do given how badly he’s failed at running Twitter.

Yesterday, I made this comment on Twitter based on Elon Musk wanting only “hardcore” employees working for him:

It would not surprise me if Twitter starts to break on Thursday when all the Twitter employees with options to go elsewhere say no to being "hardcore".

— The IT Nerd (@The_IT_Nerd) November 16, 2022

It now seems that I might have been right. Graham Cluley is an independent security analyst who has previously worked for Sophos and other security firms. What he says on his blog is kind of scary:

Because although most of what I do on Twitter is public, I have also had plenty private direct message (DM) conversations in the almost 15 years I’ve been a user on the site.

I can’t remember everything I’ve said in those conversations, or what people may have said back to me.

If Twitter is careless enough to break how 2FA works for some of its users a few days ago, what mistake might they make next? If Twitter’s security experts have either been fired, have quit, or – presumably – are wondering where they should go next, then just how safe is my data on Twitter?

It may be a remote possibility that Twitter will have a monumental security screw-up or suffer a hack that it simply doesn’t have the expertise to protect against, but it is a possibility. And it’s a possibility that seems more probable today than before Elon Musk bought the company.

There’s not anything I can do to make a chaotic Twitter safer. But I can reduce the potential risk to me, by deleting my DMs.

That’s right. He’s deleting his DM’s. And he recommends that the person on the other end of the conversation do the same. Now Cluely is a guy I follow, and if he says something or does something, it’s probably in your best interest to do it as well. And seeing as I’m kind of in the same boat that he is in, which is that some of what I do on Twitter is public, but I get a whole lot of tips via DMs. That means that on my to do list this weekend is to delete all my DM’s. Though he does point this out:

PS. You know what’s really galling? Erasing your Twitter DMs doesn’t actually stop Twitter from keeping a copy of your private messages unbeknownst to you, even if you one day completely close your account.

Yeah. That sucks. But any step that I can take to protect myself or my sources is a good one.

The fact is that Elon has no way of protecting Twitter from being pwned seeing as he’s fired the people who can protect Twitter from getting pwned. Assuming that the few that are left don’t get fed up with working for a moron with delusions of grandeur and quit. Which means that it’s up to you to protect yourself so that nothing bad happens to you because Elon has no clue how to do that.