Twitter's offices abruptly shut down as hundreds of employees refused to continue working under Elon Musk's new vision for the social platform.
The CEO asked Twitter employees to either commit to an “extremely hardcore” culture at the company that involves “long hours at high intensity” or leave with severance. Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5pm (ET) on Thursday would receive three months of severance pay.
Overnight it was reported that "lots" of employees had not signed up for Elon Musk's Twitter 2.0 hardcore edition.
Before the deadline, Musk and his advisers held meetings with “critical” Twitter employees in an attempt to dissuade them from leaving. He also seemed to retreat on his stance on not allowing people to work from home in confusing messages about the company’s remote work policy.
Earlier this month, Musk fired executives, slashed off half of the workforce, and fired any remaining staff who dared to bruise his ego on Twitter.
Hashtags like #RIPTwitter, #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterOFF were the top trending hashtags among the users of the social network.
Musk has tried to mitigate the damage by bringing engineers and managers from his other companies, but the future of how Twitter will maintain its ability to handle misinformation and operate day-to-day is unclear as the thousands of employees have left in such a short amount of time.
“There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
a former employee told the Washington Post
"I think when the dust clears today, there's probably going to be less than 2,000 people left.”
Other former employee told to BBC
"The manager of that team, his manager was terminated. And then that manager's manager was terminated. The person above that was one of the execs terminated on the first day. So there's nobody left in that chain of command.”
Another person said they had resigned even though they had been prepared to work long hours.
"I didn't want to work for someone who threatened us over email multiple times about only exceptional tweeps should work here when I was already working 60-70 hours weekly”
Despite the turmoil at the company, Musk tweeted on Friday:
And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol04:07 AM - 18 Nov 2022
Before Musk took control of Twitter the company had more than 7.000 staff. The firm also reported to have employed thousands of contract workers, the majority of whom are understood to have been fired.
Musk seemed unconcerned about reports that Twitter was on the brink of shutting down
Dave Portnoy@stoolpresidente
What do people mean when they say Twitter is gonna shut down? Doesn’t it kinda run itself? I feel like engineers are for changes not to just keep it running? I also don’t know anything. Hey @elonmusk wanna do a Twitter space with me? Im confused.03:47 AM - 18 Nov 2022
Later on he tweeted a meme showing a gravestone with the Twitter logo on it.
How are you feeling about Twitter potentially shutting down?
Top comments (1)
It's not going to shut down in the near term, there's simply too much money invested to let it implode within Elon's first month.
Outages or bugs? I expect those with all this public turmoil.
Will it eventually fail? Possibly, time will tell.