I dare you to level up against the Final Boss!
Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees on Saturday night, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 who were still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily pared back its work force from about 7,500 employees as he has sought to reduce costs.
Well, I was wrong: I had thought he would realize that he had cut too deeply with the initial cuts and would be hiring some back.
Rumors swirl that Musk is following through on his promise to step down as CEO, by appointing someone he already works with and trusts to follow his agenda.
It seems that outages at Twitter are on the rise, as those with the knowledge to diagnose problems get laid off. There were four widespread outages in February as compared to 9 in all of last year.
Gift link:
More rumors of chaos inside Twitter.
An engineer at Twitter, who was granted anonymity by the BBC because he’s still working there, described conditions at the company.
“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” he said.
"When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working, he continued. “All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.”
More on the recent outage:
before Musk bought Twitter, “the company had a risk evaluation team that vetted product changes for anticipated problems.” But that “team was laid off after Musk’s takeover… leading to product rollouts that were riddled with bugs.”
Brian
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/tech/elon-musk-twitter-employee-disability/index.html
I won’t editorialize as that would violate the breaking rules, but I’ll quote:
But, Thorleifsson said in his tweet, “your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not.”
Musk responded in a tweet asking, “what work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of his tasks in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” he tweeted. In a separate tweet, the billionaire said Thorleifsson “did no actual work, claimed as an excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing.”
The person in question has muscular dystrophy.
Twitter’s press email account now auto responds to every inquiry with a poop emoji. 
Although I admit, part of me wants to hear an NPR reporter say “We reached out to Twitter for comment, and we got the following response: poop emoji.”
I suppose that means anyone wanting Twitter’s official response is just shit out of luck.
Why do I have the hunch that one of the laid-off techies implemented that as his last act before being ushered out, and now nobody’s left who knows how to reverse it?
Nonsense. Elon knows just about there is to know about software engineering so he could easily reverse it if he wished!
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/how-good-is-the-ultra-legend-elon-musk-at-coding/
Will you accept a WSJ article saying this?
Unfortunately it’s paywalled, but if you are able to read it you will see the following:
In response to a request for comment, Twitter’s press email responded with a poop emoji, which Mr. Musk recently tweeted will be the company’s auto-response for media inquiries.
This should be a gift link
It’s unfortunate they found it necessary to include the context. The joke is less funny if you have to explain it.
It was funny before the explanation? I guess if you are a teen boy, poop emoji responses are hilarious.
No, I mean for the WSJ to write in an article that
In response to a request for comment, Twitter’s press email responded with a poop emoji
Without further explanation would be funny, because then it would sound as if that were actually Twitter’s response to this specific inquiry. I’d like to see all the news stories just report it that way, straight. It would be joke on Twitter, not a joke Twitter made.
Quoting myself from a ways upthread:
I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I gotta say I thought the absolutely straight-faced explanation of the poop emoji was hilarious!
The “state affiliated media” label is meant for outlets where the government has editorial control over the content, such as Chinese state media. That is very much not true of NPR.
I did get my wish from the poop emoji story, though:
In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company’s press account auto-replied with a poop emoji