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The fallout from Elon Musk’s request for Twitter employees to commit “hardcore” to make or get out of Twitter 2.0 revealed that some people would rather get out if given the choice. Following the Tesla mogul’s statement earlier this week that staff made it clear they were all in or leaving (with severance pay), a whopping 1,200 of the remaining 3,700 employees chose to resign.
The exodus went so fast that Musk and the rest of the executives were afraid to lock down Twitter headquarters and deactivate security badges until November 21.
According to the New York TimesTwitter’s “staff numbers are likely to remain fluid as the dust settles on the exits, with confusion over who tracks employee numbers and manages other workplace systems.”
The Time also reported that some “who quit said they separated themselves from the company by disconnecting the email and logging out of Slack’s internal messaging system because employee representatives were unavailable.”
Workers leaving in droves could easily trigger a series of consecutive disasters for the social media site, marked by Thursday night’s top Twitter trends such as #TwitterMigration and #TwitterTakeover. As the Associated Press (via the LA times) reported Friday night:
Three engineers who left this week described to the Associated Press why they expect significant upheaval for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that more than two-thirds of Twitter’s pre-Musk core service engineers are apparently gone. While they don’t anticipate a collapse any time soon, Twitter could get really rough, especially if Musk makes big changes without doing much off-platform testing.
The AP further noted that cybersecurity is also a growing concern. For example, a NBC report Published a week ago, fraud-detection firm Proofpoint was quoted as saying it had “detected a ‘remarkable’ increase in scammers operating on Twitter, including a ploy to rob people of their savings.”
Musk, for his part, has tweeted through it, sometimes it seems acknowledge that things aren’t going great, but also taking steps that sparked widespread and often controversial discussion across the site, including a poll he tweeted Friday night to see if users thought he should let former president Donald Trump return to the platform.
As of 11 p.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 18, the poll was 55 percent for Trump’s return and 44 percent against.
