Twitter employees publicly slam Elon Musk for criticizing the app: 'Like did you even bother to learn?'

• Several Twitter employees slammed Elon Musk on social media after he criticized the app.
• Musk said he fired one of the engineers who pushed back on his criticism.
• One employee said he worries the app will experience outages as a result of Musk's plans.

Twitter employees are taking to social media to criticize Elon Musk after the CEO apologized for the app "being super slow in many countries."

In his tweet, Musk appeared to suggest that the app was poorly written — a comment that several current Twitter engineers were quick to address.

"I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong," Eric Frohnhoefer, a software engineer at the company, said on Twitter. The tweet was later deleted.

After the engineer appeared to question Musk's technical competence, Musk called the engineer out on Twitter.

"Twitter is super slow on Android," Musk responded. "What have you done to fix that?"

Frohnhoefer said Twitter has done a "bunch of work" to improve the app's performance on Android phones. He added that there is "plenty of room for improvements," but disputed Musk's diagnosis of the issue.

Musk later responded that Frohnhoefer had been "fired," but The Daily Beast reported the engineer appeared to have kept his job, as Frohnhoefer was still active on the company's Slack hours later, a source told the publication.

Frohnhoefer did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication, but wasn't the only Twitter employee to take issue with Musk's criticism.

"You did not just layoff almost all of infra [Twitter's infrastructure team] and then make some sassy remark about how we do batching like did you bother to even learn how GraphQL works," Sasha Solomon, a software engineer, wrote on Twitter. "You don't get to shit on our infra if you don't know what the fuck it does while you're also scrambling to rehire folks you laid off."

Solomon currently works on Twitter's Core API Platform team, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Last week, Musk laid off about 50% of Twitter's workforce. Since, the billionaire has attempted to bring some of the staffers back, Insider's Kali Hays reported.

Sam Pullara, a Twitter staff member that left the company in 2014, appeared to correct Musk on Twitter, saying the "real issue" is that Twitter undid "server side" rendering code he had written years prior. Now "you have to download tons of code to just see a single tweet," he said.

—Sam Pullara (@sampullara) November 13, 2022

Musk said Pullara was "wrong." The billionaire added that he plans to turn off "'microservices' bloatware'" on Monday. Musk also said he plans to cut a Twitter feature that allows users to see what device was used to send a tweet.

"Less than 20% [of microservices] are actually needed for Twitter to work!" Musk said on Twitter.

Sheon Han, a software engineer at Twitter who said he works on some of the microservices, was quick to diss Musk's idea, saying he predicted a "massive outage in the next few days" as a result of Musk's plan to cut back on microservices.

"'Turn off 80% of all services today' reads less like an engineering decision by my new employer than an attack plan by hackers launching a DDoS attack," Han said in a tweet that was later deleted.

Solomon, Han, and Pullara did not respond to a request for comment from Insider. A spokesperson from Twitter also did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.