San Francisco, California - Parts of the software code of social media platform Twitter were published online following a major data leak, according to court documents.

Twitter has requested the US district court for the Northern District of California to issue a subpoena to GitHub, the platform where the code was published, to identify the individual who shared it and provide data on all users who might have seen or downloaded the code.

The social media platform, which was bought by billionaire Elon Musk last year, also launched an internal investigation, the New York Times reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources.

One of the company's concerns is that the code might still contain unidentified weaknesses which hackers could exploit to sabotage the platform, according to the report.

The leadership at Twitter only recently learned of the leak, which was online until last week, the New York Times said.

The leaked code may have been online for over two months, as the GitHub account which Twitter says is responsible for the leak last uploaded data on the platform on January 3.

The extent of the leak was initially unclear. Source codes are among a tech company's best-kept secrets. Twitter asserted copyrights in order to have the data removed from GitHub.

Internally, the company suspects that a former employee might be behind the leak, according to the New York Times.

After taking over the company for some $44 billion last year, Musk went on to fire about half of Twitter's 7,000 employees at the time.