In another new episode of the Musk-Twitter (chaotic) saga, several company employees have ended their stint with the micro-blogging platform after Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk issued an ultimatum of an “extremely hard-core” work environment. Reportedly, employees including several engineers rejected being part of what Musk calls ‘Twitter 2.0″. Employees started sending farewell messages in the company’s Slack on Thursday, announcing that they rejected Musk’s ultimatum, according to The Verge report.
CNBC spoke to three Twitter employees who said that they are planning to resign on Thursday. As of now, it is not clear exactly how many people have left the company. Meanwhile, Twitter Inc. also announced it was temporarily closing its offices until Monday after more workers than expected opted to leave. The move came to avoid confusion over which people still have access to the company property, according to a memo viewed by Bloomberg.
On Wednesday, Musk sent a companywide email telling employees to expect “long hours at high intensity” if they wanted to stay adding that employees had until 5 p.m. ET on Thursday to decide. The company was left with roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the latest wave of resignations; around 7,500 employees were laid off in the first week after Musk’s takeover. In a tweet Thursday evening, the CEO said, “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”
On the other hand, some departing employees said that they expect the platform to start breaking soon as “legendary engineers” are deciding to move on. “It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” The Verge quoted one employee as saying. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
Soon after, #RIPTwitter, #TwitterDown, #GoodByeTwitter, and similar other hashtags started trending on the platform. Several users online started speculating that the site could go down in a matter of hours or days. Many started sharing links to their pages on other platforms like Instagram as an alternative to the microblogging platform.
