The doors of the Twitter offices are closed. Another wave of layoffs swept through the company last Thursday. Anyone who did not explicitly agree to an ultimatum from boss Elon Musk had to go (read more here). According to The Verge, hundreds rejected the new terms and left the company. The exact number remains a mystery. Some sources put the figure at just over 200, but experts and insiders like Casey Newton estimate it was in the thousands. Musk had actively tried to keep the number small. In the run-up to the ultimatum, he softened a strict “home office ban” in the hope of being able to attract good people.
A former employee told the BBC that he expects there will be around 2,000 people left working for Twitter at the end of the day. When Musk took over the company a few weeks ago, there were around 7,500. Allegedly for fear of sabotage, the decision was made to close the office space over the coming weekend as a result of the many departures, some of which were made public on Twitter.
However, Elon Musk is not expected to deviate from his strategy. The new owner of the social network made fun of what was going on in his company on several occasions, for example published a picture of Twitter crouching on Twitter’s grave and lost himself in tasteless Star Wars-related jokes and ambiguous puns.
Due to the enormous decimation of employees on Twitter, the question arises in various trends as to whether the social network can even survive this loss of expertise behind the scenes. Guides are making the rounds on how to easily switch to the most popular Twitter alternative to date, Mastodon (learn more here).
Musk is also completely cold. Dave Portnoy, a well-known Twitter user with millions of followers, reached out to Musk and asked, “What do people mean when they say Twitter should be shut down? Doesn’t it sort of take care of itself? I have a feeling that the developers responsible for making changes and not just keeping it going? I have no idea either. […] I’m confused.” A little later, Musk replied: “The best people stay, so I’m not too worried.”
It remains to be seen whether the clear-cutting of Twitter will lead to a page failure. In an article in the Washington Post, a former employee says: “I can think of six critical systems that no longer have developers. There isn’t even an emergency crew monitoring the system anymore. It will continue to run – until it hits a Problem encounters. Then it will stop.”
It seems as if Musk relies on Twitter not having unforeseen outages for the time being, which would require a handful of experts within a very short time to quickly get faulty systems up and running again. Because, it seems, Twitter doesn’t currently have them.
Incidentally, this also applies to temporary workers who could be deployed quickly where there is currently a lack of permanent experts. At the beginning of the week, Musk reduced the number of available people from 5,500 to 1,100. Entire team structures also fell under the wheels, sometimes without the remaining Twitter employees being informed of this with sufficient notice.
Musk’s quick, sometimes harsh and apparently ill-considered actions ensure that frustration within the company is growing – and Musk’s public reputation is also increasingly damaged. In the evening, the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco were illuminated with a banner. It featured some nasty insults against Musk, including “Space Karen,” “lawless oligarch,” “little pimple,” “apartheid profiteer,” and other very personal insults.
Musk has not yet commented on the banners. He recently tweeted that critics who are proclaiming the demise of Twitter should please just go. He also poked fun at the fact that the site’s user count is at an all-time high while everyone is talking about its demise.
