After Elon Musk’s ultimatum to Twitter employees, hundreds of employees said no to being part of his ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter.
“Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company,” The Verge reports.
“And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack.”
Twitter’s Slack currently has hundreds of employees giving the 🫡 emoji, meaning they decided to not stay for Musk’s “Twitter 2.0” cultural reset. The company had just under 3,000 employees remaining before the deadline to say “yes” or not hit 20 min ago.
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 17, 2022
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We are collecting departing Twitter employee messages from the company’s Slack and public tweets here https://t.co/UmPz0rRpvK
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 18, 2022
Am hearing the number of Twitter resignations today is likely over 1,000, though unclear as not all are posting their decision.
Some teams, such as the engineering team that manages Twitter’s core system libraries, are completely gone now. https://t.co/UmPz0rRpvK
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 18, 2022
Thread here is collecting resignation tweets from Twitter engineers, many of whom are senior / have been at the company for a long time https://t.co/U8sbrWrf5F
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 18, 2022
Am hearing that Twitter’s acting CISO is no longer at the company. He had stepped into the role after the previous CISO resigned last week before having to deliver Twitter’s latest compliance notice to the FTC. https://t.co/JeR0jIVF8U
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 18, 2022
Musk set a 5 p.m. ET deadline on Thursday for all employees to respond ‘yes’ on a Google form to stay for Twitter 2.0.
Otherwise, it would be their last day of work and they would receive a severance package.
“After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum,” The Verge adds.
“I’m not pressing the button,” one departing employee posted in Slack.
“My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
Cont. from The Verge:
Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services. The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.
Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.
“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” Musk tweeted.
The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
Reuters added:
The billionaire owner also added: “We just hit another all time high in Twitter usage…,” without elaborating.
Musk met some top employees on Thursday to try to convince them to stay, said one current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with Twitter colleagues.
The company also notified employees that it will close its offices and cut badge access until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers began kicking some employees out of one office on Thursday evening, one source said.
Over 110 Twitter employees across at least four continents had announced their decision to leave in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, though each resignation could not be independently verified. About 15 employees, many in ad sales, posted their intention to stay at the company.
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