Twitter's head of engineering Foad Dabiri has announced that he is stepping down, in a move that comes a day after the platform's floppy launch of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign announcement.
“After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday. The combination of the fantastic community, the impact it has, and its limitless potential sets Twitter apart,” Dabiri tweeted on Friday.
He admitted that the October 2022 purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk had made work “challenging”, with plenty of “outside noise,” but it had put a positive spin on the situation. According to Dabiri, he had learned enormously from the experience.
He did not specify what was behind his decision to leave Twitter, and whether it was related to the problems pertaining to the DeSantis presidential bid event. Twitter has not commented on Dabiri’s resignation yet.
His remarks followed DeSantis' entry into the White House race on Wednesday being hit by problems as a Twitter live stream malfunctioned. US media reported that an initial 500,000 people logged in to watch, but when the event eventually began after a 20-minute pause, only half that number remained.
Musk along with moderator David Sacks insisted that the problems were due to “server strain” and “melting the servers,” because the DeSantis bid purportedly was the largest event ever hosted online. The Tesla and SpaceX boss, for his part, later tried to laugh off the lapse, tweeting about “top story on Earth today.”
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion, told a UK news outlet last month that slashing the company’s workforce from about 8,000 people at the time he bought the firm to roughly 2,000 had not been easy. The fired employees included scores of engineers responsible for the Twitter site's operations and technical troubleshooting.
22 January 2023, 12:58 GMT
The DeSantis campaign has, meanwhile, announced that despite the glitches-filled Twitter event, the Florida governor managed to raise a whopping $8.2 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate. Just for comparison, former US President Donald Trump collected around $9.5 million in the six weeks after he announced his 2024 White House bid in mid-November 2022.