vulnerabilities remaining unpatched due to lack of maintenance may result in some good stuff being leaked.
I thought it was wishful thinking until today, but it seems hard to come back from this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/17/elon-musk-twitter-closes-offices-loyalty-oath-resignations
Most computer systems will run unmaintained a lot longer than their maintainers expect, so I don’t think it’ll undergo a total technical meltdown for weeks. Once the compounding errors start hitting though, the skeleton crew left over will not be able to figure out the root causes of any of the problems, and there could be week-long outages.
I’m no computer scientist, but that seems more true for closed computer systems performing functions without a ton of novel input rather than a system constantly dealing with novel input and output like social media.
That’s not even taking into account malicious actors who will now know that Twitter is vulnerable and want to have a go at fucking it up.
A social network’s content isn’t novel from the computer’s perspective. It’s just text, images, and videos. And twitter is big enough that it should already have been bombarded by malicious actors all the time. I’d expect things are fairly well hardened.
The most common reason that systems fall over is because some other engineer made a change that should’ve been unrelated, but tripped over a dumb assumption or needlessly brittle system. If it’s a complete ghost town, that stops happening, so you’re left with physical computer problems, out of memory errors, some maintenance script that you didn’t realize was just running on one dev’s box, and that sort of thing. Of course, since it’s only stable because nobody is touching it, it can mean everything falls apart as soon as people come back and start trying to do normal work.
