Elon Musk’s cuts at Twitter are reportedly degrading the service for users, affecting employees’ work

Ever since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the social media platform has been making some big cuts in order to save money. Data centers have been shuttered(Opens in a new tab), rent(Opens in a new tab) hasn’t been paid, and thousands from the company have been laid off as Musk attempts to make his $44 billion acquisition make sense financially.

These cuts may have helped Musk save a little cash, but they are reportedly affecting Twitter’s remaining employees, and the very platform itself. 

According to Platformer(Opens in a new tab), public data from latency tracking tool Singlepane found that Twitter has been “slowly degrading” since Musk cut(Opens in a new tab) the company’s data center in Sacramento. The outlet’s sources at Twitter confirmed that the latency and outage issues line up with what the company sees internally as well. 

And Twitter users should strap in for more issues ahead as the report also details more cost-cutting measures just this week, as workers at Twitter have been unable to access tools like Slack and Jira. 

Slack is a piece of communications software used by many online companies. As one current Twitter employee mentioned, Slack is also a very important knowledge base tool. Slack chat histories are saved and provide a convenient way to go back and reference old information. After layoffs at Twitter, the remaining workers were able to go back to those old conversations and troubleshoot issues when the employee with the relevant knowledge was no longer with the company.

Jira, a project management and bug tracking tool, did eventually return after Twitter employees were unable to access the app all Wednesday. Due to these issues though, the company’s engineers ended up taking the day off according to Platformer.

Slack, however, remains shut off. And, while Twitter owes Slack money, the tool wasn’t shut off by Slack. Twitter reportedly shutdown its employees’ access internally. 

Musk’s other companies like Tesla, as Platformer points out, use tools like Slack alternative Mattermost and Microsoft’s suite of software for internal communication and meetings. Even if a software transition is afoot, it’s unusual for any company to shut off these internal tools without prior notice.