It is thought that hundreds of Twitter employees are leaving the struggling social media company after new owner Elon Musk gave them an ultimatum: work “long hours at high intensity” or leave.
In a poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and lets them share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer “Taking the exit option, I’m free!”
A quarter of the people who took the poll said they chose to stay “reluctantly,” and only 7% said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m tough.”
One current employee and a former employee who is still in touch with Twitter colleagues said that Musk was meeting with some top employees to try to get them to stay.
Related: Elon Musk says he will find a new CEO for Twitter.
Even though we don’t know how many employees have decided to stay, the numbers show that some staff members don’t want to work at a company where Musk has quickly fired half of the employees, including top management, and is changing the culture to emphasise long hours and a fast pace.
Two sources say that the company told its employees that it would close its offices and stop letting them in until Monday. One source said that security guards have started kicking people out of the office as of Thursday night.
Late Thursday night, Musk posted on Twitter that he wasn’t worried about people leaving because “the best people are staying.”
In the middle of a flood of resignations, Twitter’s billionaire owner said that the number of users has reached an all-time high.
In a tweet, he said, “And we just hit another all-time high in Twitter use.” He didn’t say more.
Twitter, which has lost a lot of people from its communication team, didn’t answer when asked for a comment.
PLATFORM STABILITY
Many engineers who fixed bugs and stopped service outages are leaving, which makes people wonder how stable the platform is now that so many people are leaving.
One person who knows about the situation said that the version of the Twitter app that employees use started to slow down on Thursday evening. This person thought that the public version of Twitter might break during the night.
“If it breaks, there isn’t anyone left to fix it in many places,” said the person, who didn’t want to be named out of fear of being hurt.
Downdetector, a website that tracks website and app outages, says that the number of reports of Twitter being down went from less than 50 to about 350 on Thursday evening.
A former employee said that in a private Signal chat with about 50 Twitter employees, almost 40 of them said they were leaving.
A person who knows about the Slack group said that about 360 people joined a new channel called “voluntary-layoff.” This channel is for current and former Twitter employees.
In a separate poll, Blind staffers were asked to guess how many Twitter users would leave based on what they thought. More than half of the people who answered thought that at least half of the employees would quit.
Thursday was the second time in two weeks that Twitter employees said their goodbyes by flooding the site with blue hearts and salute emojis.
By 6 p.m. Eastern time, more than two dozen Twitter employees in the U.S. and Europe had posted on Twitter that they were leaving the company. Each resignation could not be independently confirmed, however.
Early on Wednesday morning, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees in which he said, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in a world that is getting more and more competitive, we will need to be very tough.”
Related: Musk says Twitter could go bankrupt because more top executives are leaving.
In the email, employees were asked to click “yes” if they wanted to stay. Those who didn’t get back to us by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday would be considered to have quit and be given a severance package, the email said.
As the deadline got closer, people rushed around, trying to figure out what to do.
An employee who is leaving the company told Reuters that one team at Twitter decided to quit together.
Tess Rinearson, who was in charge of building a cryptocurrency team at Twitter, left in a big way. Rinearson put the blue heart and thumbs-up emojis in a tweet.
Musk asked employees to be “hardcore.” On Thursday, the Twitter bios of several engineers who were leaving the company said they were “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers.”
As more and more people left, Musk made a joke on Twitter.
He tweeted, “How do you make a small fortune on social media?” “Get started with a big one.”