Hundreds of Twitter employees tendered their resignations after new boss Elon Musk stamped his authority with a hardcore ultimatum, sparking fears of an end to the ‘blue bird’ platform.
Why did hundreds of Twitter employees quit?
As reported by The Verge, internal messages shared by employees on Slack sparked the viral ‘RIP Twitter’ hashtag trending globally on Friday morning.
Hundreds of Twitter employees opted out of the social media company after Musk, it’s believed, forced workers to select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on a Google Form, on whether they are staying for what he terms the blue bird’s cultural reset, or ‘Twitter 2.0’.
Those who opted in would secure their job and help Musk overhaul Twitter into the ‘open source’ platform he’s preached about for years. The naysayers, on the other hand, would be booted out of Twitter HQ with a severance package, joining dozens of workers who were fired by Musk earlier this week for criticising and mocking the billionaire in tweets.
According to a source quoted by The Verge, before Friday’s purge, Twitter had about 2 900 employees.
Now that hundreds more have resigned, some staffers believe it’s only a matter of time before the social media platform breaks down 16 years after its launch.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving. It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be,” one employee said.
At this juncture, Twitter remains operational with crucial members of certain departments gone, that includes:
- Twitter’s traffic and front-end teams;
- Twitter’s core system library engineers;
- Twitter’s Command Centre team; and
- Twitter’s API management department
Is this the end of the ‘blue bird’? – Here’s Elon Musk’s take
At the time this article was published, the Twitter app was still operational, with no visible issues detected, and the new owner, Elon, does not seem a tad bit concerned about the mass exodus.
In fact, in a tweet response to one concerned user, Musk stressed that he was not ‘super’ worried because “the best people are staying.”
The South African-born billionaire also teased — in another tweet response — that “there’s a chance we can keep Twitter alive,” with a shrunken workforce.
Here’s how social media reacted to the ‘RIP Twitter’ trend: