elon musk twitter employees: After Elon Musk’s ultimatum, Twitter employees start exiting

Hundreds of Twitter workers are estimated to be leaving the beleaguered social media company following an ultimatum from new owner Elon Musk for employees to sign up for “long, high-intensity hours” or quit.

In a survey on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer to “Man the opt-out option, I I am free!”

A quarter said they had chosen to stay “reluctantly” and just 7% of those polled said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m strong”.

Musk was meeting with several key employees to convince them to stay, said a current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with Twitter colleagues.

While it’s unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the numbers highlight the reluctance of some employees to stay at a company where Musk has rushed to lay off half of its employees, including senior management, and is relentlessly changing the culture to emphasized long hours and intense pace.

According to two sources, the company notified employees that it will close its offices and cut off badge access until Monday. Security officers began evicting employees from the office on Thursday evening, a source said.

Twitter, which has lost many members of its communications team, did not respond to a request for comment.

The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service disruptions, raising questions about the platform’s stability amid the loss of employees.

On Thursday evening, 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 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 retribution.

Reports of Twitter outages rose sharply from fewer than 50 to about 350 reports Thursday evening, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks website and app outages.

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 leave,” said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.

A separate survey for Blind asked staff to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated that at least 50% of employees would leave.

Blue hearts and greeting emojis flooded Twitter and its internal chat rooms on Thursday, the second time in two weeks that Twitter employees said their goodbyes.

As of 6 p.m. ET, more than two dozen Twitter employees across the United States and Europe had announced their departures in public tweets reviewed by Reuters, although each resignation could not be independently verified.

Earlier Wednesday, Musk emailed Twitter employees, saying, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely strong”.

The email asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stick around. 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 approached, employees scrambled to figure out what to do.

A team within Twitter decided to take the plunge together and leave the company, an outgoing employee told Reuters.

In an apparent jab at Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of some departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as “soft engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”