Security News > 2023 > February > What Twitter’s outage says about (over) zealous downsizing

While the Twitter outage affected comparatively few Twitter users, it could hold a larger message about the dangers not just to operations but also security for organizations mulling big cuts in workforce.

With just 1,300 active staff, Twitter now has 80% fewer workers than the roughly 8,000 the company had on its payroll before the October 2022 takeover by Elon Musk, by some reports.

Reportedly, many of the Twitter employees who were let go or who have walked out voluntarily in recent months were working on projects that are fundamental to company operations, and former staffers and observers alike predicted that firing employees would lead to just the kinds of outages the company is experiencing.

Adam Marrè, chief information security officer at cybersecurity operations firm Arctic Wolf, concurred that the outage means there are now likely too many vacant IT chairs at the blue bird's command center.

Although employing open-source code has numerous security implications, Cappos said the advent of DevSecOps has improved the security environment and made it easier for developers to work fast within cloud environments like AWS without sacrificing security.

"There are a lot of really great software projects and security projects in that space, and Kubernetes has a very good security team working on this. They have made it more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot; they have defined better tooling around it so that people who do DevOps work can do security as part of that."

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/twitter-outage-downsizing/