- A Twitter engineer told the BBC that the company is "like a building where all the pieces are on fire."
- Twitter's workforce has shrunk by around three-quarters since its purchase by Musk.
A Twitter engineer says that chaos at the company has gotten so bad that it's "like a building where all the pieces are on fire."
The unnamed engineer, who said he wished to remain anonymous because he is still working at the company, told the BBC's Marianna Spring that Elon Musk's leadership of the company – in particular recent mass layoffs – had caused huge problems, including "so many" parts of the site being broken. The BBC did not confirm the worker's location.
"When you look at it from the outside, the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working," the engineer said. "All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything."
Since Musk bought the social-media platform for $44 billion in October, Twitter's workforce has been depleted through a series of layoffs, firings, and resignations. Musk has previously defended his decision to reduce the workforce in order to save costs.
CEOs and experts have been divided in their reaction to Musk's approach, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff telling Insider recently that Silicon Valley leaders should consider whether to emulate Musk's style when it comes to tough decisions around layoffs.
Twitter's layoffs have resulted in an extensive reorganization of remaining workers, the engineer told the BBC. He said that one "totally new" staff member without expertise was now doing a job that used to be done by more than 20 people. The New York Times previously reported that some junior employees have been left in charge of areas they haven't worked on before.
"There are so many things broken and there's nobody taking care of it," the engineer told the BBC. Musk had also brought some Tesla engineers in to review code created by Twitter employees, he added.
The BBC reported that Musk had cut so many staff that the site couldn't protect users from trolling and disinformation. Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter's former head of content design who quit in November, said her whole team, which worked on some projects to reduce hate on the platform, was laid off. Speaking about the features her team had introduced, she said: "There's no-one there to work on that at this time."
Reports have suggested that there has been more hate speech on the platform, including data from the Anti-Defamation League indicating a huge surge in antisemitism on Twitter in the immediate weeks after Musk took over.
Musk responded to The BBC's report this week by tweeting: "Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise into place that has … trolls." Musk said in December that fewer people are viewing content containing hate speech since he bought Twitter and that the number of hate speech impressions on the platform was down by a third.
Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside of its regular working hours.