The BBC’s technology editor looks at claims that Twitter may be heading for calamity.
Twitter today is awash with people saying goodbye.
The hashtag “RIPTwitter” is trending and lots of the site’s users are scrambling to download their data.
They’re also sharing alternative places to find them (consumer champion Martin Lewis, who has 2m Twitter followers, has set himself up on Mastodon, although he admits he doesn’t know how to use it yet).
Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk, never one to ignore a trend, tweeted a meme of a gravestone with the Twitter logo on it.
Staff have been leaving in their droves – half the workforce was laid off by Mr Musk one week after he completed his purchase of the platform, and many more are choosing to leave since he sent an email demanding “hardcore” working conditions and long hours from his remaining employees.
Quite a few of those departing, according to their Twitter bios, are engineers, developers and coders – the people who work on the guts of what makes Twitter function.
Let’s take the two biggest vulnerabilities that could knock the blue bird off its perch very swiftly.Could it be hacked?
The first and most obvious would be a catastrophic hack.
Twitter, like all big websites (including this one, the BBC), will be constantly under attack from bad actors – even at state level – wanting to cause mischief. World leaders, politicians and celebrities all have personal Twitter accounts with millions of followers – a low-hanging fruit for a hacker wanting a lot of people to see their scam, as we have seen before.
