• Thousands of Twitter employees have been laid off, and Twitter cut costs in infrastructure.
• It's creating a situation where a large-scale failure at Twitter is now possible.
• "It's unclear what can crash until things actually crash," an employee said.

Employees at Twitter are no longer sure they can keep the site functioning in the face of the unexpected.

Elon Musk took over Twitter over two weeks ago and has since laid off an estimated 3,200 full-time employees, along with at least that many contract workers. Such a dramatic reduction in headcount has left those who survived layoffs overworked and scrambling to complete projects or find help, three current and three former Twitter workers told Insider, matching numerous private Slack messages Insider reviewed. These workers spoke on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak to press, and their identities are known to Insider.

With fewer hands in critical engineering and moderation roles, there are growing concerns about whether Twitter can continue to function under increased usage, particularly during major events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup, sources said. Downloads and usage of Twitter have already surged since Musk took over the platform.

"If an issue does occur, recovery will take longer because the people tasked with maintaining core services have been laid off," said a former Twitter engineer who left ahead of Musk's purchase.

A program manager impacted by the layoffs said last week they were being asked so often for help by still-employed coworkers they were left "concerned and confused about what is appropriate," according to one message. Others said they had simply turned off their notifications to avoid being asked for help by former colleagues.

"It's kind of like you want to help your coworkers, but you don't owe the company free labor at this point," a former engineer said.

A Twitter spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Twitter is already under strain

A big test for Twitter will be the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off this weekend. The month-long event is watched by more than 3 billion people and tends to coincide with higher usage of Twitter.

The 2014 event set the record for tweets per minute, doubling the current average of roughly 350,000 tweets per minute. In 2018, Twitter boasted its "massive role" in World Cup fandom that year and live matches, which drove 115 billion views of tweets with the World Cup hashtag. This year's event is being hosted by Qatar, leaving it mired in accusations of corruption and human rights abuses that could drum up further debate on Twitter.

The Germany team lifting the FIFA World Cup in 2014. Martin Rose/Getty Images

Supporting events like the World Cup will come with additional challenges for a smaller staff, including workers tasked with keeping up critical services that keep the site running. There are fewer people to fill around-the-clock "on call" shifts for critical services because so many people have been laid off or quit in recent weeks, one current worker said. As a result, employees in critical services are now frantically trying to train people in other parts of the company to help ease the current workload.

One current employee said "outages of some kind" seem like a certainty, while another noted, "really, it's unclear what can crash until things actually crash." A former employee who left before Musk's takeover said that the loss of much needed staff means "the infrastructure will be less scalable to meet the demands of higher site usage."

"At least when the outages start, our remaining friends can keep their jobs for a while," one current employee wrote on Twitter.

Already, Twitter has experienced smaller functionality issues. Users have taken to Twitter to complain about "likes" of tweets not sticking, notifications not showing up, and feeds refreshing constantly or incorrectly. Data from SimilarWeb provided to Insider shows that beginning on Nov. 6, two days after the Musk's first mass layoff, Twitter's Help page began to see a large uptick in visits, exceeding 3 million for the first time. Help page visits rose to 3.3 million on Nov. 10.  

Twitter's own offering of a two-factor authentication, an often recommended tool to keep accounts more secure, also stopped working, many users reported this week.  The tool was affected by Musk's decision on Monday to turn off the many "microservices" at Twitter, a current employee said. Musk referred to them in a Twitter post as "bloatware," insisting that only 20% were needed to keep the site running.

An engineer working on many of these very microservices disagreed, saying he's "predicting a massive outage in the next few days" should 80% of such services be shut down.  

"Foundational knowledge" is gone

After the layoffs, Twitter saw a major loss of engineers in privacy, security, and IT infrastructure. Many of these employees worked in a group known internally as RedBird, which has now been effectively dismantled, a former employee said. Last week, Twitter's chief information security officer, chief privacy officer, and chief compliance officer all resigned within one evening.

People walk by the Twitter office on April 26, 2022 in New York City. Kena Betancur/VIEW press/Getty Images

Musk seems to be aware, on some level, that the loss of so many key employees is a problem. 

Across the company, rank and file workers who survived layoffs were told to effectively re-recruit laid off colleagues, particularly engineers working on the Twitter app and various media functions, as Insider reported. But convincing people to return to the chaos under Musk has been a tough sell, two current employees said. Those who do return have no guarantee they won't be fired or laid off again. Meanwhile, many who survived layoffs are "definitely prepping and interviewing" for other jobs, one of the employees said.

Twitter is now down to roughly 4,000 full-time workers. Much of its "foundational knowledge," as well as "relationships with countries' governments, law enforcement, and brands," are now gone after many people were either let go or resigned, a former employee said. 

Trust and safety teams "lost all of their engineers and their agents, but the people who do administrative work are still around," the person said.

They compared it to a war in which "you keep all the paper pushers" in order to "kill the army."

Are you a Twitter employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at [email protected], on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.

To get in touch with Lara O'Reilly, email [email protected].