Elon Musk's Troubles Mount As Twitter Suffers Major Source Code Leak

According to recent court filings, parts of Twitter’s source code were leaked online, adding to the social media giant’s struggles since Elon Musk acquired the company.

What Happened: On Friday, Twitter took action to remove the leaked source code by issuing a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, resulting in its prompt removal. However, it is uncertain how long the code had been publicly available, reported The New York Times. 

This comes after Musk announced that the platform would “open source” all code used for recommending tweets.

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According to the filing, Twitter also requested the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to mandate GitHub to disclose the identity of the individual who disclosed the code and any other parties who may have downloaded it.

Twitter executives have concerns about the code being used by hackers or other motivated parties to extract user data or take down the site as it included security vulnerabilities, the report noted. 

Anthony Levandowski, a self-driving car engineer, received an 18-month jail term in 2020 for unlawfully obtaining code from Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL Google. Microsoft Corporation MSFT suffered a breach last year, resulting in a hacking group’s theft of its source code.

Twitter executives also surmised that whoever leaked the code left the company in 2022, the report stated, citing two people briefed on the company’s internal investigation. 

Why It’s Important: Since Musk bought Twitter, about 75% of the employees have either left or been fired. The site has been dealing with several technical issues, including bugs and outages.

On Friday, Musk also told employees that Twitter was worth roughly $20 billion — less than half of what he paid. 

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