🧵 Hard to keep up with the threats-promise-sacking-unsacking Melon Musk psycho drama.
Having announced all staff would be expected to work unlimited hours for no extra anything- accept-or- consider-yourself-sacked ultimatum it looks as if the walk outs were more than Melon bargained on.
“The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of employees.
This prompted hurried debates among managers over who should be asked to return, current and former employees said.
“In an early sign that the number of those declining to sign was greater than anticipated, Musk eased off a return-to-office mandate he had issued a week ago, telling employees on Thursday they would be allowed to work remotely if their managers asserted they were making “an excellent contribution”.
What a massive jerk.
“ Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday, the New York Times reported.”
Per NYT Given the choice between Melon O’Clock hours + irrational sackings by the thousand (half the personnel has already been sacked) and 3 months pay “ resignations started to roll in. By the deadline, 5 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay, the people said”
“On Twitter, the hashtag #RIPTwitter began trending as users wondered whether the service would go down. Some people posted memes of gravestones with the epitaph that Mr. Musk had killed the service, while others joked that there was only one employee left. Some users said they were migrating to other social media services.”
No response to press requests for comments, the Social Media Department having shut down!
“Mr. Musk’s team also held meetings with undecided employees who are key to Twitter’s operations to try to persuade them to stay, three people said. In his pitch, Mr. Musk said that he knew how to win and that those who wanted to win should join him”
How very Trumpy
“As the 5 p.m. deadline passed, some who had called in (on Melon’s conference call) began hanging up, seemingly having decided to leave, even as Mr. Musk continued speaking, two people familiar with the meeting said.”
Update from Reporter, Kylie Robison, from Fortune. NB based on internal “chatter” rather than hard verified fact
She says : “It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email.
Even though the deadline has passed, everyone still has access to their systems. folks on visas are stuck, so thats who makes up most of the roughly 25% (or less than 1,000….) expected to stay.”
https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280?s=61&t=JG2pzriFRuKCY84KrJho_Q
“ The actual impact is not yet known — there have been no internal comms about what comes next. We’re nearly 2 hours post deadline. Employee’s badge access has been disabled until Monday. It does seem like there will be … not much left of the company by then.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%”
“10% of the 3,700ish remaining employees deemed critical were called to a meeting an hour before the 5PM deadline today. The invite was sent around midnight but got cancelled by noon.(US time).”
What an utter shit show.
But it does beg the very serious question about whether there should be state controls over who should be allowed to buy platforms like Twitter.
Millions rely on it for news and comms.
Think of Ukraine’s ability to communicate its desperate plight.
According to @gergelyorosz
“90% of Twitter’s eng staff is gone vs 3 weeks ago, incl those who maintained key infra.
Outages will be incoming. The best case scenario is they’ll be temporary.”
I cannot see how the website is sustainable without drastic reversals
This is a good
https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/
In the first couple of paragraphs, The entire Payroll team and the US tax department has resigned...
thanks to @BafDyce for this
@ParkinJim ah! That’s the third source suggesting this. (Just added it to my 🧵) Whether they are each repeating one another (like me) or have separate sources would be interesting to know.
@Fascinatorfun business insider seems to be the original and it's pretty reliable, if usually an aggregator
