A legal document revealed that some of Twitter Inc.'s source code has been leaked, and the social media site, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, is looking for information on the perpetrator.
The filing claims that a user going by the name of "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" shared "various excerpts" of the source code used to power Twitter's online operations on Github, a platform controlled by Microsoft.
GitHub said it took down the code on Friday at Twitter's request.
According to the filing on Mar. 24, Twitter has requested that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California force Github reveal "All identifying information" connected to the username "FreeSpeechEnthusiast."
A Reuters request seeking comment on whether it had provided such information was not immediately answered by Github.
It also did not comment on how long Twitter's source code had been publicly available.
A request for comment from Twitter also did not receive a prompt response. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk declared earlier this month that on Mar. 31, the service will make "all code used to recommend tweets" open source.
Musk claimed Twitter's algorithm is "overly complex & not fully understood internally," but added this transparency should allow the company to improve the quality of its recommendations and earn user trust.
According to sources, it is unclear whether the Twitter algorithm or Musk's announcement are connected to the leak on GitHub.
The number of employees at Twitter has decreased from 7,500 to roughly 1,800 after Musk took over the firm last year by firing more than 75% of its employees.
Many senior engineers, teams that worked on Twitter's back-end technology, and those with "institutional knowledge" were among those laid off.
As a result, the platform has had numerous significant outages, including one earlier this month, as well as serious glitches and instability.
GitHub is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git.
It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
It is commonly used to host open-source software development projects. As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories.
It is the largest source code host as of November 2021.
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