Twitter

More engineers, product managers, and data scientists are out at Twitter, as another round of layoffs has slashed 10 percent of the remaining staff, The New York Times reported. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told the Times that 200 employees were affected.

On Saturday night—just as it happened during Twitter’s November layoffs—some employees discovered they were about to lose their jobs when they were abruptly logged out of corporate email accounts and laptops. Now there are fewer than 2,000 employees left, it’s estimated.

Since the financial crisis, corporate lawyers have aspired to build the ultimate ironclad merger contract that keeps buyers with cold feet from backing out.

The “bulletproof” modern deal agreement now faces one of its biggest tests, as Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and richest person in the world, openly entertains the possibility of ditching his $44 billion deal for Twitter.

Elon Musk has cast more doubt on his willingness to buy Twitter, criticizing the company's CEO and saying the "deal cannot move forward" until Twitter provides data behind its estimate of spam accounts. Musk also said this week that renegotiating the deal at a lower price is "not out of the question."

Nearly half of the teams in the National Football League appeared to have their Twitter accounts hacked Monday afternoon.

As of the time of this story's writing, 15 verified accounts belonging to professional football teams have tweeted out strange messages, and had their profile photos and banners disappear. The apparent hacks appear to have all happened within the span of a couple hours on Monday.

Twitter is claiming to have resolved a bug that allowed a group of London-based security researchers to post unauthorised tweets to the accounts of British celebrities and journalists. But the hackers who initially disclosed the vulnerability says that’s complete rubbish.

Head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has admitted that the company's verification system is "broken" after a blue tick was awarded to white supremacist Jason Kessler. There was a backlash this week after Kessler -- who helped to arrange the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville earlier in the year -- had his Twitter account verified.

Responding to the negative reaction this prompted, Twitter announced that its verification program has been paused. The company also said that the verification tick had been largely misinterpreted by people.

Twitter said Thursday it has shut down 235,000 accounts linked to violent extremism in the last six months alone. That brings the total number of terminated Twitter accounts associated with terrorism to 360,000 since mid-2015.

San Francisco-based Twitter, which had come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to crack down on extremist speech on its site, said it condemns acts of terrorism and that it is "committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform."

For the just the second time in its history, Twitter has built a new smartphone app.

Sure, Twitter offers apps like Vine and Periscope. But it bought those. The company’s new app is the first Twitter has built from scratch since, well, the Twitter app itself. That’s a big deal—but, as it turns out, only if you speak code.

Social notworking site Twitter says it has fixed the buggy software which caused a worldwide outage yesterday.

Users from Scandinavia to Saudi Arabia to South Africa reported outages. India and Russia also suffered performance issues, according to a Twitter technical site.

Both Twitter’s Internet and mobile services began experiencing outages concentrated in northern Europe around 0820 GMT. Intermittent breakdowns later spread to the United States and Canada in the early part of their working day.

Longer tweets are coming soon to Twitter.

Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character limit, according to these sources. That’s the same character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product, so it isn’t a complete surprise.