According to the court document, the code was posted on GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development, which complied with a request by Twitter to take it down.

GitHub said the content had been removed, according to the filing. It was unclear how long the leaked code had been online, but it appeared to have been public for at least several months, according to The New York Times.

Twitter asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted the source code without Twitter’s authorisation. Twitter noted in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by the company.

The documents were filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion (€40.93 billion) and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.

Meanwhile, Musk has reportedly said that Twitter is now worth less than half what he bought it for.

In an email viewed by The New York Times that was sent to employees to announce a new stock compensation plan, Musk said the company was now worth about $20 billion (€18.6 billion).

In it, Musk warned staff that Twitter remained in a precarious financial position and, at one point, had been four months away from running out of money. He said “radical changes” including mass layoffs and cost-cutting were necessary to avoid bankruptcy and streamline operations.

Since November, Twitter has laid off around 3,700 people, or roughly half of its workforce, including staff who had publicly embraced Elon Musk’s "hardcore" vision for the social media platform, while many others have resigned.

The Federal Trade Commission is probing Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight into the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report.