Sheila Dang, Paresh Dave and Hyunjoo Jin, Reuters Published Thursday, November 17, 2022 9:13 PM EST Last updated Thursday, November 17, 2022 10:18 PM EST
Nov 17 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Twitter employees are expected to leave the beleaguered social media company after an ultimatum from new owner Elon Musk that employees sign up for “long, high-intensity hours” or leave .
In a survey of workplace app Blind, which verifies employees via work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer to “Take the exit option, I’m free!”
A quarter said they had chosen to stay “reluctantly”, and only 7% of survey participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m hardcore”.
Musk was meeting with some of the top employees to try to convince them to stay, said one current employee and one recently departed employee who is in touch with colleagues at Twitter.
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 been quick to lay off half of his employees, including management, and it is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and an intense pace.
The company notified employees that it will close its offices and cut access to badges until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers began evicting employees from the office 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 stability of the platform amid the loss of employees.
By Thursday evening, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began to go 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 breaks, 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 rose sharply from less than 50 to about 350 reports Thursday evening, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks website and app outages.
In a private chat 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 survey on Blind asked employees 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 were fired.
As of 6 p.m. Eastern, more than two dozen Twitter employees in the United States and Europe had announced their departures in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, though each resignation could not be verified. independent way
Early Wednesday, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees saying, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough 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 to have resigned and received a severance package, the email said.
As the deadline approached, employees scrambled to figure out what to do.
A team at Twitter decided to take the leap together and leave the company, a departing employee told Reuters.
Notable departures included Tess Rinearson, who was tasked with building a cryptocurrency team at Twitter. Rinearson tweeted the blue heart and greeting emojis.
In an apparent blow to Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday were described as “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”
When the resignations came, Musk made a joke on Twitter.
“How do you make a small fortune on social media?” he tweeted. “Start with a big one.”