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Twitter bans product changes this week to stop employees from ‘going rogue’

By Anita George April 26, 2022

Buying the bird app was apparently the easy part. Twitter’s transition to being under Elon Musk’s ownership is already off to a rough start it seems. And it’s only been less than a day since the deal for the Tesla CEO to buy the company for $44 billion was reached.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Twitter has essentially banned changes to its product through Friday, with the only exception being “business-critical” changes approved by a vice president. The short-term limit on product changes isn’t so much surprising as the reason given for it: Apparently, the ban was set to prevent “employees who may be miffed about the deal from ‘going rogue.'”

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Which gives the impression that the transition could be shaky. It’s one thing to have a few employees be unhappy with the news of the sale. But it’s quite another to have to be concerned about unauthorized edits being made to your product because of that unhappiness.

Also, it’s not as if those employees are alone in their concerns. Many users of the app share them. Not long after the sale was announced on Monday, the response from Twitter users was immediate and polarizing. There was a deluge of tweets praising and also lamenting the sale. And many of the tweets from the latter category included declarations to leave Twitter for other apps.

Only time will tell how Musk’s endeavor to take Twitter private will ultimately turn out, but so far, the first day after the sale doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

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