Twitter's voyage through rough weather continues, with the microblogging site potentially facing fines to the tune of tens of billions of euros in Germany for failing to take down hate speech posts.

As per a report by Techcrunch, more than 600 cases regarding hate speech on Twitter are pending before German courts. Adding fuel to the fire, earlier this week, Germany had announced an investigation into  "suspected systemic failures under the country’s hate speech takedowns law". As per Techcrunch, the law, known colloquially as NetzDG, allows for fines of up to 50 million euros per case.

Last year, The New York Times had reported major increases in hate speech since Musk took Twitter October-end and fired staff in Germany and axed the content-moderation team in the US.

Last week, Elon Musk told his employees that Twitter — which he bought for $44 billion last year — is worth about $20 billion now. Assuming all 600 cases in Germany go against Twitter, the social media giant will have to fork out 30 billion euros in fine — that's nearly $33 billion dollars, or 65 percent more than what the company is worth now. This could very well mean Twitter will go bankrupt. While all this is theoretical at the moment, the number and amount of fines could easily stack up to tens of millions of dollars, at the very least.

As per the Techcrunch report, Germany is initially looking into "just a handful of tweets out of hundreds that have been reported and collated in a database".  The report adds that some of the abusive tweets were posted by a user who had been banned before Musk's takeover, but has since had his account reinstated.

The German government, Techcrunch adds, was spurred into action after a legal challenge succeeded in establishing the tweets were illegal, and said it has found “sufficient indications of failures” in Twitter’s complaint management processes. This could result in the first penalty for a social media company for failure to remove illegal content under NetzDG.