Hundreds of Twitter employees are expected to leave the beleaguered social media company after new owner Elon Musk’s ultimatum that staff sign up for “long, intense hours” or quit.
In a poll on workplace app Blind, which authenticates employees with their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people said the “opt-out option Lena, I’m free!” Chose the answer.
A quarter said they chose to stay “reluctantly” and only 7 percent of poll participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m a die-hard.”
Musk was meeting with some top employees and convincing them to stay, said one current employee and one recently departed employee who is in touch with Twitter colleagues.
While it’s unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the number reflects the reluctance of some employees to stay at a company where Musk has been quick to lay off half of his employees, including top management, and long Brutally changing the culture to emphasize hours. speed
According to two sources, the company notified employees that it would close its offices and reduce access to badges through Monday. A source said that the security officers had started evicting the employees from the office on Thursday evening.
Musk took to Twitter late Thursday and said he wasn’t concerned about the resignations because “the best people are staying.”
Amid the flood of resignations, the billionaire owner also said Twitter was at its highest ever.
“And we hit another high in Twitter usage…”, he said in a tweet without elaborating.
Twitter, which has lost several members of its communications team, did not respond to a request for comment.
Stability of the platform
The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of employees.
On Thursday evening, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began slowing down, according to a source familiar with the matter, who speculated that the public version of Twitter was at risk of crashing overnight.
“If it breaks, there’s no one left to fix things in many areas,” said the person, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals.
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks website and app outages, reports of Twitter outages jumped from less than 50 to over 350 on Thursday evening.
In a private conversation with about 50 Twitter staffers at Signal, about 40 said they had decided to quit, according to the former employee.
And in a private Slack group of current and former Twitter employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary layoffs,” said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.
A separate poll on Blind asked staff to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their feedback. More than half of respondents estimated that at least 50% of employees would quit.
Blue hearts and salute emojis flooded Twitter and its internal chat rooms on Thursday, the second time in two weeks that Twitter employees said goodbye.
By 6 p.m. Eastern, more than two dozen Twitter employees in the United States and Europe had announced their departures in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, although not every resignation could be independently verified. .
Earlier on Wednesday, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees, saying: “Going forward, in order to succeed in the development of Twitter 2.0 and in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely tough”.
The email asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stick around. who did not respond by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday and will consider offering a severance package, the email said.
As the deadline approached, employees scrambled to figure out what to do.
A team within Twitter decided to take the plunge and leave the company, an employee who is leaving told Reuters.
Among the notable departures was Tess Reinerson, who was tasked with building the cryptocurrency team at Twitter. Rainerson tweeted blue heart and greeting emojis.
In an apparent blow to Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several of the engineers who left on Thursday described themselves as “soft core engineers” or “former hard core engineers.”
As the resignations came to light, Musk made a joke on Twitter.
“How do you make a small fortune in social media?” he tweeted. “Start with a big one.”
