1. Loads of people and companies would set up Twitter clones/successors to try and cash in. Some of these would be federated/open source, some wouldn't, but eit

1. Loads of people and companies would set up Twitter clones/successors to try and cash in. Some of these would be federated/open source, some wouldn't, but either way, it's likely one or more would take off thanks to the Twitter refugees. 2. Existing Twitter alternatives would see a huge boost in popularity. Mastodon would get thousands of new signups in a matter of minutes/hours, and niche alternatives like Minds and Gab would probably see a fair bit of growth as well. 3. The media would panic as they realise the 'easy source of news' they've been relying on is gone and they don't know which replacement will take off yet. 4. Some 'lucky' alternative would end up attracting Donald Trump, and the popularity (from both fans and critics) would likely send the servers into meltdown. Given his political views, I can see Gab being the winner there. 5. The job market would see an increase in software engineers, designers, dev ops guys, etc if Twitter's workforce were also laid off/the company didn't exist anymore. It wouldn't be too noticeable (those fields are already super packed with candidates as is), but you'd see a small jump in numbers none the less. 6. Many, many news sites, blogs, wikis and forums would break horribly, since they used tweets as sources in articles and posts. Think the recent Photobucket catastrophe was bad? Well, the number of Twitter embeds likely dwarfs that by a thousandfold. I think that sums it up.