Twitter's Top Engineer Quits a Day After Ron DeSantis Campaign Flop

A chief engineer at Twitter announced he was leaving the company a day after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' launch of his 2024 presidential bid on the platform was beset by technical glitches.

"After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday," Foad Dabiri, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as director of engineering at Twitter, tweeted on Thursday.

Dabiri made no mention of DeSantis' presidential announcement on Twitter and it was not clear if it was linked to his departure. Newsweek has contacted Dabiri for comment with a message on Twitter.

On Wednesday, DeSantis launched his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces, but the platform's audio live-streaming tool proved tricky for Florida's Republican governor and Twitter's owner Elon Musk. The tool repeatedly crashed in the lead-up to the highly anticipated call, leading to a nearly half-hour delay.

The sound dropped for long stretches and the thousands of users who had tuned in for the call were unable to listen in.

While Musk said the problems were due to "straining" servers because so many people were trying to listen in to the event, which was audio-only, the number of listeners only topped out at around 420,000.

DeSantis' opponents from both sides of the political spectrum had a field day. "Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that's just the candidate!" said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, who has a big lead over DeSantis in polls on the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

"We had more people join when I played Among Us," wrote Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, referencing the popular video game which she played during the pandemic on the streaming platform Twitch.

The former chief engineer, who had previously worked as a senior software engineer at Google between 2011 and 2014, had been at Twitter since July 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile. In his tweets announcing his departure from Twitter, Dabiri did not explain the exact reasons that led him to leave the company, instead giving a shout-out to his team and praising the company.

"Twitter is a place that defies comprehension. It's unique, peculiar, remarkable, and resilient, all thanks to the brilliant and capable individuals who have built and continue to shape it," Dabiri wrote. "It's impossible to grasp the inner workings of this platform and what goes on on a daily basis unless you've been fortunate enough to experience it firsthand. So kudos to the team that, despite all the outside noise, keep going and going strong."

The former chief engineer called working with Musk, who took over the company last year after a rocky acquisition deal which cost him roughly $44 billion, "highly educational."

"It was enlightening to see how his principles and vision are shaping the future of this company," Dabiri wrote.

Since taking over the company last year, Musk's leadership has been marred by controversies, with some accusing the billionaire of running the social media platform into the ground.

Musk told the BBC in April that he had cut Twitter's workforce from just under 8,000 to about 1,500, a drop of around 80 percent.

Musk has made the once coveted verified blue tick on Twitter a paid feature accessible to anyone willing to pay a monthly subscription fee to Twitter Blue, and reinstated the accounts of many who had been banned from the platform—including Trump.

Musk named Linda Yaccarino, former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, this month as Twitter's new CEO.