Some parts of Twitter Inc’s source code — the fundamental computer code on which the social network runs — were leaked online, the social media company said in a legal filing on Sunday that was first reported by the New York Times.
The legal document, filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said that Twitter had asked GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted.
The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, the filing showed.
Photo: AFP
Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, said in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by Twitter.
CHAOS
The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October last year for US$44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.
The US Federal Trade Commission is also probing Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight into the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report.
LOSING VALUE
Meanwhile, Musk has estimated the value of Twitter at US$20 billion, less than half of what he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, an internal e-mail showed.
The e-mail to employees referred to a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company and the allocation of shares to employees of X Holdings I Inc, Twitter’s umbrella company.
The compensation plan values the platform at US$20 billion, slightly more than Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc (US$18.2 billion) or Pinterest Inc (US$18.7 billion), both of which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter.
In the internal e-mail, Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitter’s value, writing that the platform faced such grave financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
“Twitter was trending to lose ~$3B/year,” Musk wrote in a message posted on Saturday on the platform.
He cited a revenue drop of US$1.5 billion per year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount — leaving it with “only 4 months of money.”
Musk added simply: “Extremely dire situation.”
Additional reporting by AFP
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