What exactly does Elon Musk need to run Twitter?

A wave of hand-wringing about whether the site will continue to function well was sparked by the resignations of more than 1,000 Twitter employees this week, many of whom were responsible for keeping the site up and running smoothly and safeguarding it from hackers.

Experts predict that Twitter (1) won't crash out of the blue, but they also say that the firm may start to experience more outages, sluggish uploads, and hacks. The services provided by Twitter depend on the following, even if the site might function perfectly for a time if only a select group of users were aware of how it was created and secured.

Platform Engineers

Engineers are the backbone of Twitter; they have created and operated the platform's fundamental architecture, the platform. Engineers also assist in managing the hundreds of thousands of servers that house all of the service's users' tweets, direct messages, follows, and likes.

Thousands of engineers worked at Twitter before Elon Musk's takeover (2), and it is unknown how many are still there. Numerous software engineers are responsible for ensuring that the website loads consistently and is secure enough to add new features and users.

A caching request team ensures that all content saved to Twitter can load quickly, and a blob storage team helps manage the storage of all videos, photos, and other types of content. A graph team keeps track of and updates databases on users they follow, and the size of these teams has significantly decreased.

Additionally, some workers oversee the physical infrastructure, such as the data centers that each house a huge number of servers. These engineers are on-site at the data center in Sacramento (3), California, to handle any disruptions like a server outage and are anticipated to resolve any other issues that could slow the site quickly.

Immediate Response

Engineers, product managers, communicators, and members of Twitter's business and revenue operations are gathered in large numbers to respond to catastrophes. Every incident—a hack, a delivery delay, an outage, etc.—is given a severity level by the group known as the command center, with zero denoting the worst issue.

Executive management receives reports on all zero incidents, and hundreds of reports are submitted on very busy days. It is anticipated that the World Cup soccer tournament (4), which starts on Sunday, will cause a significant increase in traffic and possibly numerous incidents of abuse, misinformation, outages, and slowdowns.

Security & Safety

Identifying dangers from external enemies and purging the website of malicious and fraudulent content falls to members of the internal security, trust, and safety teams. Musk expressed a desire for less moderation on the website before taking over the company, but he has since become a little less clear in his position.

Musk hinted on Friday that the site's software would make some postings less visible in people's feeds when he tweeted that negative or hate tweets would be max deboosted and delisted, resulting in no advertisements or other revenue for Twitter.

Twitter needs international regulatory specialists to negotiate with governments. While this would take time in the United States and Europe, advocates expect it to happen sooner in nations like India or Brazil.

Sales

Musk is looking for new ways to bring in money for Twitter, which is currently solely dependent on advertising, but he is currently at a loss. Advertisers are pulling out of deals to display their products on the platforms, citing concerns over the rise of harmful content on Twitter under Musk as reasons for their decision to do so. This is an attack on the business model.

Affected by the departure is also the revenue team in charge of selling ads, even though these workers are not in charge of the technology's mission-critical operations. Without them, the business would be unable to survive financially.