As more employees made the decision to quit, Twitter briefly closed its operations in Dublin and other locations, raising new questions about the site's capacity to remain up.
The social media behemoth has reportedly closed its headquarters until Monday out of concern that dissatisfied employees would try to harm the business, according to sources in the US.
It follows an alleged rejection by hundreds of employees of an ultimatum from the new owner Elon Musk to sign up for longer, harder working hours in order to create a new "hardcore" Twitter. Mr. Musk reportedly threatened to fire those who did not sign up.
All that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring you are making an excellent contribution
The Twitter CEO had issued an email to colleagues on Wednesday asking them to affirm they would continue working for the company under his new policies by clicking yes on a form. Those who had not done so by Thursday evening would have received three months' worth of severance compensation.
Mr. Musk and his team seem to have been startled by the amount of employees who decided to depart.
The billionaire has since changed his position on the requirement that everyone work from the office; initially, he had rejected remote work, which had alienated many workers who had survived the original round of layoffs.
In an email to staff, he softened his earlier tone by stating that "your manager must take responsibility for ensuring you are making an excellent contribution" in order to receive approval.
Along with this, employees would be required to hold "in-person meetings with your colleagues on a regular cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month."
Since assuming control of Twitter less than three weeks ago, Mr. Musk has laid off half of the 7,500 full-time employees of the firm as well as an undetermined number of contractors in charge of content moderation and other important tasks.
Many people have already turned to Twitter to bid their coworkers farewell, and there are rumours that hundreds of employees have confirmed their departure in private communication channels.
As a result, worries have been expressed that the platform may have trouble remaining operational as a huge number of employees responsible for maintaining it quit the organisation and that any difficulties may be harder to resolve without key engineers on staff.
As users explore leaving the site and some start directing followers to their accounts on other platforms, the hashtags #RIPTwitter and #GoodbyeTwitter have started trending on the website.
Despite the continuous unrest, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has continued to tweet, frequently making fun of the criticisms of the business by sharing memes and jokes about it.
How do you make a small fortune in social media?Start out with a large one.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
“How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start with a large one,” he joked.
He also claimed that the concerns were driving more traffic on the site, saying overnight the company had “just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage”.
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