Hundreds of Twitter Inc employees are suspected to have decided to leave the troubled social media company following a Thursday deadline from new boss Elon Musk that employees take up “long hours at high intensity,” or quit.
The departures underscore the hesitation of some of Twitter’s 3,000 or so employees to stay at a company where Musk previously axed half of the workforce including top management, and is savagely changing the culture to emphasize long hours and a strong pace.
Musk went on Twitter late on Thursday and said that he was not bothered by resignations as “the best people are staying.”
The billionaire owner also added:
“We just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage…,” without elaborating.
Musk met several top employees on Thursday to try to persuade them to stay, said one current employee and a recently departed employee who is in contact with Twitter colleagues.
The company also informed staff that it will cut badge access and close its offices until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers started throwing some employees out of one office on Thursday evening, one source said.
More than 110 Twitter employees across at least four continents had declared their decision to quit in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, though each departure could not be confirmed. Nearly 15 employees, most in ad sales, announced their intention to remain at the company.
In Twitter’s internal chat tool, more than 500 employees wrote farewell messages on Thursday, a source with knowledge of the notes said.
A poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and enables them to disclose information anonymously, showed 42% of 180 respondents going for “Taking exit option, I’m free!”
A quarter said they had decided to stay “reluctantly,” and only 7% of the poll participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m hardcore.”
The actual number of employees planning to resign from the company could not be immediately determined. Twitter would not reply to a request for comment.
Twitter Platform Stability
The resignations include many engineers in charge of fixing bugs and preventing service outages, sparking questions about the stability of the platform amid the departures of employees.
On Thursday evening, the version of the Twitter app used by staff started slowing down, according to one source with knowledge of the matter, who concluded that the public version of Twitter was at risk of crashing during the night.
“If it does break, there is no one left to fix things in many areas,” the person said, who refused to be identified for fear of retribution.
Reports of Twitter outages grew rapidly from less than 50 to nearly 350 reports on Thursday evening, according to website Downdetector, which tracks app and website outages. In a private chat on Signal with nearly 50 Twitter employees, roughly 40 said they had decided to quit, according to the former employee.
And in a private Slack group for Twitter’s former and current employees, nearly 360 people joined a new channel called “voluntary layoff,” said a person familiar with the Slack group.
A different poll on Blind asked employees to approximate what percentage of people would resign from Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated at least 50% of staff would resign.
Early on Wednesday, Musk emailed Twitter staffers, saying:
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore”.
The email asked employees to click “yes” if they planned on staying. Those who would not have responded by 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday would be deemed to have resigned and given a severance package, the email said.
As the deadline neared, employees scrambled to work out what to do. One team within Twitter decided to make the move together and exit the company, one employee who is departing told Reuters.
Buy Bitcoin NowBlue hearts and salute emojis swamped Twitter and its internal chatrooms on Thursday, the second time in two weeks as Twitter staffers bid their farewells. Headlined departures included Tess Rinearson, who was assigned to forming a cryptocurrency team at Twitter. Rinearson tweeted the blue heart and salute emojis.
In an evident jab at Musk’s call for staffers to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several quitting engineers on Thursday described themselves as “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”
As the resignations streamed in, Musk bantered on Twitter.
“How do you make a small fortune in social media?” he tweeted. “Start out with a large one.”
