Twitter says its source code leaked on GitHub, blames ex-employees

Twitter also launched an internal investigation to determine who was responsible for the leak. So far, the investigation has concluded that the person involved left the organisation last year

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A part of Twitter's source code, the primary computer code on which the social network platform runs, leaked online, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET). The news has come out in a legal filing that talks about a rare and critical breach of intellectual property. This comes at a time when Twitter is struggling to reduce its technical issues and put its finances in order.

Twitter sent a notice to GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software developers. Twitter has alleged that its source code was posted on GitHub. The report said that GitHub complied with the notice and took down the code. However, it is unclear how long the leaked code was available online. The report added that the code appeared to have been public for at least several months.

Additionally, the legal document filed by Twitter has also requested the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who leaked the code, along with those who accessed the code online and downloaded it.

Twitter also launched an internal investigation to find out who was responsible for the leak. So far, the investigation has concluded that the person involved left the organisation last year, the report said.

The leak has caused Twitter substantial financial damage. On March 24, Elon Musk told Twitter employees in an email that the company was worth roughly $20 billion, less than half of what he paid when he bought the platform.

The report added that when approached for a response, Elon Musk did not comment about Twitter's code leak. GitHub also declined to share any details about the decision to remove the code. However, GitHub posted about the request made by Twitter to remove the code from its website.