Early Wednesday, Musk emailed Twitter employees, saying, “Going forward, to create a groundbreaking Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we’re going to have to be extremely tough.” The email asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stay. Those who did not respond by 5 p.m. ET on Thursday would be considered resigned and given a severance package, the email said. As the deadline loomed, workers scrambled to figure out what to do. In a poll for workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42 percent of 180 respondents chose the answer “Opt out, I’m free! “ A quarter said they chose to stay with the company “reluctantly” and only 7 percent of those polled said they “click yes to stay, I’m a die-hard.” The company notified workers Thursday night that it would close its offices and cut off badged access until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers have begun evicting employees from the office, a source said. Twitter owner Elon Musk has reportedly been talking to some top employees in an attempt to convince them to stay at the social networking company. (Mary Altaffer/The Associated Press)
Stability of said platform
Twitter, which has lost several members of its communications team, did not respond to a request for comment. Musk has been meeting with some top employees to try to convince them to stay, said a current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with colleagues on Twitter. The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of workers. On Thursday afternoon, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began to slow down, according to a source familiar with the matter, who estimated that the public version of Twitter was at risk of breaking overnight. “If it’s broken, there’s no one left to fix things in many areas,” said the person, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. Reports of Twitter outages spiked from fewer than 50 to about 350 reports Thursday afternoon, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks website and app outages. While it’s unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the numbers underscore the reluctance of some executives to remain at a company where Musk has rushed to lay off half its employees, including top management, and is relentlessly changing the culture by emphasizing long hours and intense pace. WATCHES | Twitter employees receive layoff notices via email:
Twitter employees receive layoff news via email
Simon Balmain tells Reuters how he found out he was losing his job at Twitter — news delivered via email.
The staff poll estimates that half the workers would quit
In a private conversation at Signal with about 50 Twitter employees, nearly 40 said they had decided to leave, according to the former employee. And in a private Slack group for current and former Twitter employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary layoff,” said a person with knowledge of the Slack group. A separate poll for Blind asked staff to estimate the percentage of people who would leave Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated that at least 50 percent of workers would leave. Blue hearts and greeting emojis flooded Twitter and its internal chat rooms Thursday, for the second time in two weeks as Twitter employees said goodbye. Twitter employees had until 5 p.m. ET Thursday to let the company know if they wanted to stay on or take a three-month severance package. (Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press) Until 6 p.m. ET, more than two dozen Twitter employees across the United States and Europe had announced their departures in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, although each resignation could not be independently verified. A team at Twitter has decided to take the leap together and leave the company, a departing employee told Reuters. In an apparent call by Musk for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as “soft core engineers” or “former hard core engineers.” As the resignations began, Musk used the platform to make a joke. “How do you make a small fortune on social media?” he wrote on Twitter. “Start with a big one.” How do you make a small fortune on social media? Start with a big one. —@elonmusk
