The resignations of more than 1,000 Twitter employees this week included many people who kept the site running smoothly and protected it from hackers. Their departures set off a wave of hand-wringing about whether the site will continue to operate well.
Twitter is unlikely to experience a sudden crash, many tech experts said. But the company could start to experience more outages, slow uploads and hacks.
“The site may run just fine for a while, kind of like you can drive a car with the check-engine light for thousands of miles,” said David Thiel, chief technologist for the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former security official at Meta. “Except in this case, people who knew what that light meant and how to service this particular model are gone.”
Here are some of the social media jobs that are needed to keep the services running.
Platform Engineers
At the heart of Twitter are its engineers who have built and run the core architecture, known as the platform. They make sure the site works smoothly for users and help manage the hundreds of thousands of servers where all of the tweets, DMs, follows and likes are stored.
Before Elon Musk took over last month, thousands of these engineers worked at Twitter. It is unclear how many remain.