Tech

Twitter Workers Flee Following Musk’s “Hardcore” Ultimatum

Published

1 year ago

November 19, 2022

(CTN NEWS) – Following Elon Musk’s deadline on Thursday, hundreds of Twitter Inc employees are estimated to have decided to leave the beleaguered social media company.

After new owner Elon Musk’s Thursday deadline for staffers to sign up for “long hours at high intensity,” hundreds of Twitter Inc employees have decided to quit.

Several of Twitter’s 3,000 or so employees are leaving a company where Musk previously fired half the workforce, including top management, and is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and intense work.

On Thursday night, Musk wrote on Twitter that he was not concerned about resignations since “the best people are staying.”

In addition, the billionaire owner said, “We just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage.” without further explanation.

And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022

One current employee and a recently departed employee in contact with colleagues on Twitter said Musk met with some top employees on Thursday to persuade them to stay.

Two sources say the company also notified employees that its offices would close and badge access would be cut until Monday. One source said security officers kicked some employees out of one office Thursday evening.

Over 110 Twitter employees across at least four continents had announced their decision to leave in public tweets reviewed by Reuters, though each resignation could not be independently verified.

Many of the company’s ad sales employees posted their intention to remain.

Over 500 employees wrote farewell messages in Twitter’s internal chat tool on Thursday, a source said.

According to the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees via their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 respondents chose the “Taking exit option, I’m free!”

Just 7% of the poll participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m hardcore,” and a quarter said they were “reluctantly” staying.

It was not immediately possible to determine how many employees intended to leave the company.

An inquiry to Twitter went unanswered.

STABILITY OF THE PLATFORM

Many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages have left, raising concerns about the platform’s stability.

According to a source familiar with the matter, the version of Twitter used by employees began slowing down Thursday evening, which put the public version at risk of breaking overnight.

According to the person, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, “if it breaks, there is no one left to fix it.”

On Thursday evening, Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, reported a sharp rise in Twitter outages from less than 50 to about 350.

During a Signal chat with about 50 Twitter staffers, nearly 40 said they were leaving, according to a former employee.

According to someone familiar with the Slack group, approximately 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary-layoff” in a private Slack group for Twitter’s current and former employees.

On Blind, staffers were asked to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their perceptions. More than half of respondents predicted at least 50% of employees would leave.

On Wednesday morning, Musk emailed Twitter employees, saying: “We will need to be extremely hardcore if we are to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 in an increasingly competitive world.”.

In the email, staff were asked to click “yes” if they wanted to stay. Without a response by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, the employee would be considered to have quit and given a severance package.

Employees scrambled to complete their tasks as the deadline approached.

According to Reuters, one team within Twitter has decided to leave the company.

Twitter and its internal chatrooms were flooded with blue hearts and saluted emojis on Thursday, the second time Twitter employees said their goodbyes in two weeks.

Around 7 p.m. PST, “RIPTwitter” topped the trending topics in the United States, followed by “Tumblr,” “Mastodon,” and “MySpace.”

Me looking back at my three followers one last time since Twitter about to shut down #RIPTwitter #TwitterDown
pic.twitter.com/1MITBwhlZB

— JC (@JuanCafecito) November 18, 2022

Tess Rinearson, tasked with building Twitter’s cryptocurrency team, left. Rinearson tweeted a blue heart and salute emoji.

As an apparent jab at Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore,” several departing engineers described themselves on Thursday as “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”

Musk cracked a joke on Twitter as resignations rolled in.

He tweeted, “How do you make a small fortune in social media?”. “Start out with a large one.”