RIPTwitter: Top engineers leaving company, its scientists moving to other websites, Trump doesn't want to come back

With the hashtag #RIPTwitter trending on Twitter recently, many users and laid-off employees alike are predicting the impending end of the Twitter era—and what's happening at the company so far is confirming their fears. The best engineers are leaving the company, many scientists and astronauts are leaving the platform. And former US president Donald Trump, whose Twitter account has been unblocked, does not seem to want to return to this social media network.

Scientists and astronauts are leaving Twitter

Amid the problems at Twitter, not only politicians and other influential figures of this social media platform, but also scientists are leaving this social network. As reported by Space.com, the hashtag #TwitterMigration is gaining popularity among the scientific community. Thus, Timnit Gebru, the former AI ethics specialist at Google, astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and many others have decided to leave Twitter.

Astronaut Jose Hernandez, in particular, wrote that he in principle refuses to pay $7.99 to have a blue check next to his name. He is also seriously considering leaving this social media platform if hateful messages are not moderated.

Trump doesn't want to go back

Elon Musk recently launched a vote on Twitter to restore former US President Donald Trump's user account. The reinstatement option won by a small margin, and therefore Trump's account, which was suspended in January 2021, is now active again.

However, Trump himself does not want to return to this platform—albeit he has more than 80 million followers there.

"I don't see any reason for it [to return to Twitter]. There are a lot of problems on Twitter, you can see for yourself what's happening there: engagement is dropping, there are a lot of fake accounts. And TruthSocial has taken the place of [Twitter] for a lot of people, and I don't see them going back to Twitter," Trump said at the Republican Jewish Coalition's meeting in Las Vegas.

Commenting on Trump's refusal to return to Twitter, Elon Musk published a provocative photo and wrote:

"And lead us not into temptation."

Apple's senior vice president Phil Schiller, who is responsible for Apple events and the App Store, deactivated his Twitter account when it became known that Trump's account had been reactivated. He has over 200,000 followers, and his account was created back in November 2008.

Job cuts at Twitter, series continues

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, many of the company's employees were fired or left on their own initiative. The departure of the best engineers makes this social media platform vulnerable to various failures and hacking attacks, and therefore, according to Bloomberg, this social network can collapse at any time.

Musk fired half of his employees almost immediately after becoming the Twitter CEO. He also later fired several engineers who were openly critical of him, either on Twitter or on the company's internal Slack messenger.

Employees even started calling him Voldemort, the main antagonist of the Harry Potter saga.

He also sent another letter to employees suggesting they work "long hours and high intensity," or quit. Many, to Musk's surprise, chose to leave. Fearing sabotage, the management even had to close the company's offices for several days.

According to Bloomberg's sources, Twitter has voluntarily left or laid off several teams whose work is critical to this social media platform’s ongoing service support—including the infrastructure teams that provide the main feed and Twitter database. Now they will have to engage specialists from other departments to replace them. However, the problem is that since there are very few employees left in the company, they will not be physically able to do the full amount of work, and this will inevitably lead to problems with the service and make it vulnerable, creating threats to the security of user data.

As explained by hosting and network security specialist, programmer-engineer Alec Muffett, an understaffed company is like a table without one of its legs; it will fall sooner or later. And in the case of Twitter, critical parts of the website, or even the entire website may go down.