Hundreds of Twitter employees post farewell messages and salute emojis in Slack and tweets, announcing their resignations after Elon Musk's “hardcore” ultimatum
Plus: The GOP releases the moral idiocy … Happy Friday. Oliver Darcy / CNN : Inside Twitter as ‘mass exodus’ of staffers throws platform's future into uncertainty Stephen Warwick / iMore : Is Twitter about to shut down for good? Latest from Musk's social meltdown, LIVE Jenny Che / Bloomberg : Musk Has to Add Twitter Moderators in Europe, Commissioner Says Mashable : 11 things I'll do with my time if Twitter dies Adam Rowe / Tech.co : 1,200 More Employees Leave Twitter as the World Cup Nears Max Read / Read Max : Two questions for Twitter's future Lindsay Clark / The Register : World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course Los Angeles Times : Elon Musk's ultimatum leaves Twitter in chaos and employees in the dark Zachary M. Seward / Quartz : A running list of all the things that aren't working on Twitter anymore Beatrice Nolan / Insider : Twitter recruiters are already asking external engineers to join ‘Twitter 2.0 — an Elon Company,’ reports say Nadeem Sarwar / SlashGear : 1,200 Full-Time Twitter Employees Reportedly Left After Musk's Ultimatum Matt Novak / Gizmodo : The 140 Funniest Tweets of All Time — The tweets that hopefully survive if Elon Musk … Tweets: Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: “Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months” 1/ Elon Musk / @elonmusk : And ... we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why. Kate Conger / @kateconger : Musk just asked all software engineers to come to an in person meeting today. Beforehand, they're supposed to email him screenshots of their recent code. Elon Musk / @elonmusk : https://twitter.com/... Kylie Robison / @kyliebytes : What I'm hearing from Twitter employees; 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. Elon Musk / @elonmusk : @stoolpresidente The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : Elon Musk is also asking for up 10 screenshots of the “most salient lines of code” from Twitter engineers 2/ Pete Haas / @dimeford : Ex-Twitter employees pitching investors next week. #RIPTwitter https://twitter.com/... Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk's Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow. Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : A few things: 1. Depending on how much critical staff has left & where — it's possible tho not probable the service could shut down at any time & for a short or long time. Relax as it used to do this a lot with the dreaded fail whale logo (see old & new one). It usually restores. https://twitter.com/... Elon Musk / @elonmusk : How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one. Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Hearing from multiple employees that the odds of Twitter breaking in the near future are very high. Kali Hays / @hayskali : Sooo I'm told by two people that the entirety of Twitters payroll department has resigned/not elected to sign up for Elons Twitter 2.0 @dmofengineering : From: @twittereng To: @elonmusk Subject: https://twitter.com/... Matt Binder / @mattbinder : all the why Elon Musk bought Twitter theories are overthinking it. it's simple. Musk is in a right wing filter bubble. he bought Twitter believing their problems were real & that others felt the same this is what happens when you have a lot of money & live in fantasy land Peter Clowes / @peterclowes : Why I left @twitter or rather why I did not sign up for “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 🧵 Jeet Heer / @heerjeet : I hope this site survives. It's a lot of fun. https://twitter.com/... Christopher Ingraham / @_cingraham : Reporting a murder https://twitter.com/... @kenchengcomedy : banks in 1929: well look at how many people want to visit our banks right now https://twitter.com/... Gergely Orosz / @gergelyorosz : Scoop: I am hearing far fewer than expected devs hit “yes”. Elon sent out an email relaxing remote working from the former draconian policy. I'm hearing he is having meetings w top engineers to convince them to stay. Sounds like playing hardball does not work. Ofc it doesn't. https://twitter.com/... Kylie Robison / @kyliebytes : TLDR on my scoop here: Preliminary data shows 1,000 -1,200 employees have resigned. Musk sent three (3!!!) emails to staff this morning asking them to bring their code for a technical interview with him. He'd appreciate it if they flew out to HQ for it. https://fortune.com/... Elon Musk / @elonmusk : What should Twitter do next? @_elizabethmay : “i'm gonna sink this site” https://twitter.com/... Gianmarco / @gianmarcosoresi : Imagine people who died on the titanic finding out we compared that to this Elon Musk / @elonmusk : @WholeMarsBlog Record numbers of users are logging in to see if Twitter is dead, ironically making it more alive than ever! Julia Alexander / @loudmouthjulia : Thinking about this @reckless thought today. Remove the hysteria and the memes and the understandable emotional reaction to what's happening here, and this feels like the most accurate approach to how our relationship with sites and platforms should exist. https://twitter.com/... Anthony Ha / @anthonyha : Gonna be real anticlimactic if Twitter's death looks more like a website getting shittier and shittier every day, rather than a glorious fiery crash Molly Jong-Fast / @mollyjongfast : It's time to consider the very real possibility that he is not a genius https://twitter.com/... @jenmsft : Guess we're gonna find out https://twitter.com/... @scottjshapiro : This guy has never gotten anything right. I'm gonna miss him. https://twitter.com/... Peter Clowes / @peterclowes : I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for. Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money (lets all be honest). All of those were radically changed or uncertain. Ryan King / @rk : Fifteen years(!) and two days after its original launch, I am re-launching https://istwitterdown.com/ Blog post with more context: https://theryanking.com/... @kofie : Me and the homies trying to figure out how Pinterest work https://twitter.com/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Am hearing the number of Twitter resignations today is likely over 1,000, though unclear as not all are posting their decision. Some teams, such as the engineering team that manages Twitter's core system libraries, are completely gone now. https://www.theverge.com/... Parker Lyons / @tweetsbyparker : 💙🫡 https://twitter.com/... Piers Morgan / @piersmorgan : Could all the people currently whining about ‘the death of Twitter’ since @elonmusk bought it... just leave Twitter? Nitasha Tiku / @nitashatiku : !!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Elon Musk / @elonmusk : 🏴☠️ Zack Bornstein / @zackbornstein : simply unforgivable that elon is forcing me to either get hot (instagram), get annoying (substack), learn what a server is (mastodon), or become an actual psychopath (linkedin) Ricardo Martinez / @rickymar49 : Elon when he becomes the only employee at Twitter HQ https://twitter.com/... @cz_binance : The more successful you are, the more people FUD about you. FUD makes you stronger, not weaker. https://twitter.com/... Rat King / @mikeisaac : musk spent Thursday in meetings across different divisions of Twitter, making personal appeals to the *many* employees attempting to resign. His pitch, paraphrased: “I know how to win. If you want to win, stay and work for me.” w/@RMac18 https://www.nytimes.com/... @jenplusplus : I resigned today from my job at Twitter. I have nothing but love and admiration for the incredibly kind and talented people I have worked with over these past 4 years. #LoveWhereYouWorked 💙 Marco Arment / @marcoarment : Hot take, if your code looks especially noteworthy in a few screenshots, it's probably too clever, and not ideal as part of a large team or a large-scale, high-stakes service https://twitter.com/... Eliot Higgins / @eliothiggins : Twitter dying would be a really big blow to the open source investigation community. It really enabled a lot of sharing of information and collaboration that led to real impact. Bellingcat wouldn't have been able to build an audience without it. Peter Yared / @peteryared : Pretty clear a bunch of engineers were not writing code, the codebase is patched crap, and the strategy will be keep the lights on while accelerating a rewrite. Probably looking to acquire something like farcaster rn. Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Word inside Twitter is that A LOT of employees are not saying “yes” to staying at Musk's “extremely hardcore Twitter 2.0.” He has been meeting today with engineers to convince them to stay. His deadline to decide to stay or leave expired 6 min ago. https://www.theverge.com/... John Biggs / @johnbiggs : Elon: You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you... Twitter workers: *jump out the window* Elon: Uh Victoria Scott / @mikurubaeahina : this is the most insane request I've ever seen. this is like saying, I run a car company, bring me the most critical individual parts on my desk so we can cut out everything els-oh my GOD wait a second https://twitter.com/... Matthew Chapman / @fawfulfan : Reminder that Elon Musk has not worked as a software engineer since the 1990s and even most biographies that fawn all over him admit that the codebase he wrote at Zip2 was worthless. https://twitter.com/... @derektmead : Allocating inventory to an ad buyer whose promoted tweet has apparently been blocked for copyright violations is a new one for me https://twitter.com/... Eva / @evacide : Wait a minute, didn't Elon lock all of the offices, disable badges, and tell everyone not to come in until Monday just last night? https://twitter.com/... Tom Coates / @tomcoates : Quick suggestion to Twitter employees considering leaking information - make sure you or someone else posts a copy of any e-mail to the internal slack—which cannot be against any rules—and then you have plausible deniability if the leak has any unusual formatting stuff in it. Ken Tremendous / @kentremendous : I like this approach. Anyone who can write jokes come over to my office at 2 PM so we can make a TV show. https://twitter.com/... Kylie Robison / @kyliebytes : 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%. Dan Primack / @danprimack : Hearing that Vine reboot is indeed one of the things on today's agenda at Twitter HQ (that magical place that's open, then closed, then open again). Flashback: https://t.co/XL6kdZnGMY Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : The Elon-stans aren't sure whether Twitter's an amazingly well-engineered product that will hold up just beautifully under profound maintenance neglect, or if Twitter engineers are lazy and incompetent and couldn't engineer their way out of a paper bag. @gmfz_resists : @ZoeSchiffer https://twitter.com/... Tom Coates / @tomcoates : Seriously, this whole fucking thing is ridiculous. “I fired half your peers, and then over half of what's left quit, and now I demand you send me screenshots of code so I can..” what?! I mean FFS. Whole thing is beyond incompetent. John Gruber / @gruber : So either (a) the offices aren't closed until next week, or (b) getting to the 10th floor is an interview puzzle to keep your job? https://twitter.com/... Ian Coldwater / @iancoldwater : This thread speaks truth. This site may be running right now, but when it goes, it's gonna go. That is not an if. That is a when. Make whatever backups you need. Exchange contact info. Make a plan. https://twitter.com/... Alexei Oreskovic / @lexnfx : Scoop via @kyliebytes — Elon Musk orders all coders to show up at Twitter HQ Friday afternoon, after data suggests 1,000 -1,200 employees have resigned https://fortune.com/... Matt Binder / @mattbinder : Elon Musk recently deleted a tweet claiming Twitter was the largest driver of traffic in the internet this is nowhere near true! why did he believe this? because his right wing bubble is obsessed with this platform. he believed it's outsized importance because of them. https://twitter.com/... Max Burns / @themaxburns : Yesterday, Musk announced Twitter offices would be closed until Monday. Less than 12 hours later, he's calling all engineers into the office. https://twitter.com/... Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : Elon Musk and his team have a list of Twitter employees who signed the offer indicating they want to stay at Twitter 2.0. Those names are in a spreadsheet. Now they're trying to figure out who's NOT on the sheet, who is on parental leave, who's actively resigning in Slack... Jon Prosser / @jon_prosser : elon: no one is allowed in the offices! also elon: meet me in the office https://twitter.com/... Jason Goldman / @goldman : Our guy is out here reviewing code like he's ordering an appetizer sampler for the table https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : I'm reading this email and the part where he goes, “please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code” ... like WHAT https://twitter.com/... Justin Wolfers / @justinwolfers : We're finally going to see a Musk product in self-driving mode. Nicholas Kristof / @nickkristof : Then again, funerals are often large gatherings. https://twitter.com/... Mateusz Fafinski / @calthalas : Twitter will not end. As a consequence of internal conflict, it will gradually transform into a series of successor polities, driven by the idea of Twitterness. There will also survive an East Twitter that, weakened by the onslaught of new social media, will continue its legacy. Bill Gurley / @bgurley : This is also why everyone rooting for Twitter to “functionally fail” are going to be disappointed. The company had 1,000 employees in 2012 and had 200 MAUs. And the systems are way better now. If they go back to that count they will survive. You are NOT seeing the “fail whale.” Elizabeth Dwoskin / @lizzadwoskin : Reminder that in some of the documents we reported on weeks ago, Elon's plan was always to get Twitter's staff to just 10% of what it was before acquisition through firings and creating an environment in which massive attrition would take place Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Ex-Twitter employee @peterclowes on why he left Twitter hits a bunch of the points I've mentioned before. 1. No compelling vision for the product besides squeezing money out of power users. 2. Work in crunch mode for limited to no financial upside. 3. Laid off too many, too fast. https://twitter.com/... Justin Williams / @justin : These people who think he's playing 4D chess are the new QAnon class. They keep deciphering his shit looking for hidden meaning or genius when the reality is much more simple: the motherfucker is just really that dumb. https://twitter.com/... Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté. Richard Signorelli / @richsignorelli : My advice to save @Twitter: Hire a competent CEO Bring back key employees/stop trashing them Extricate yourself from running the company Stop tweeting crazy 💩that alienates creators Separate yourself from deranged RW consp theories Replace your enabling advisors who are using u https://twitter.com/... @cwarzel : i get this point and agree with the spirit of it but what it doesn't consider is that the reason people think twitter is going to die is because there currently aren't enough technical humans to fix problems should they occur. not philosophical issue but a logistical one. https://twitter.com/... Nick Bilton / @nickbilton : Twitter employees used to joke: “Twitter is the company that can't kill itself.” Everyone speculating Twitter might die now, it's not happening. It's like the jellyfish “Turritopsis dohrnii” which is ‘biologically immortal.’ This chaos is just part of its DNA & how it thrives. Alyssa Farah Griffin / @alyssafarah : I hate the idea of Twitter potentially failing during the Iranian protests. It's played a huge role in amplifying protestors' voices & keeping their struggle front & center globally. https://twitter.com/... Sam Adler-Bell / @samadlerbell : Say what you will about Elon's management style, but before he took over all you guys posted was “ugh another day on this hell site” and now you're all like “ah twitter the extraordinary place where I met all my best friends, started my career, had sex for the first time” Sarah Kendzior / @sarahkendzior : What's happening to Twitter is not the same as what happened to MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr, or other faded sites. People gradually moved from those sites on their own accord to better options. What's happening to Twitter is a controlled demolition. Travis Akers / @travisakers : From one of the remaining Twitter employees: “It (Twitter) has about a week left before it's dead.” @buffyblogs : Helping Elon buy Twitter: $12 billion Shutting down the #1 Saudi dissident platform: Priceless https://twitter.com/... @anildash : Every single one of these dozens of items is a real threat, known to anyone who manages systems with millions (or hundreds of millions) of users, and one will pop up nearly every day. And none are issues you'd find at, say, a car company. Only a fool would ignore these risks. https://twitter.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : True story: Twitter once tried to acquire Instagram! The two were like peanut butter and jelly. Did you know that in the old days if you posted an Insta link to Twitter, the image automatically displayed on here? Then Facebook bought Insta and killed that feature. https://twitter.com/... Bris Angel / @cryptoterra : is kissinger seriously going to outlive Twitter Zack Bornstein / @zackbornstein : pre-elon twitter: pls free me from this hellsite post-elon twitter: Everyday with you all has been a gift. I owe my career, my friendships, and my marriage to this community. I've fostered compassion and activism each and everyday with you all, fighting the good fight (1/40) ParisMarx / @parismarx : I know Elon Musk's whole reputation is built on taking credit for work he didn't do, but this is really taking it to another level. https://twitter.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : Returning to the Fail Whale era https://twitter.com/... Chris Hayes / @chrislhayes : Rhymes with “Schmabor is the source of all value” https://twitter.com/... Charlie Stross / @cstross : THREAD. (Why twitter is likely to fail hard—and probably irrecoverably—in the coming days to weeks.) https://twitter.com/... Dan Primack / @danprimack : Gotta give Elon credit. He's managed to lower expectations from: “Wow, he's going to make Twitter so much better.” to “Wow, Twitter's still online.” Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Business as traffic accident is not, per se, a winning formula. https://twitter.com/... @kaderariz : At least 30% of all my feed is now the worst ads I have ever seen. This is probably how the world will look after the rapture David Gilbert / @daithaigilbert : As @dellcam discovered, Twitter seems to be stopping users from posting the URL for mastodon in tweets. I just tried it and got this message https://twitter.com/... Avi Bueno / @avi_bueno : We should probably have a serious discussion about the ease with which a billionaire haphazardly purchased & immediately destroyed a company that employed 7,500 people and facilitated essential communication for hundreds of millions. Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : 7. Will life go on? Why yes & so may Twitter if Elon gets his head out of his red-pilled ass, focuses and stops with a performative weak sauce Trump impersonation. Even Trump sucks at being Trump these days (see last speech). In any case, you can stay or go. It's a free Internet. https://twitter.com/... Michael Gartenberg / @gartenberg : Banks who loaned Musk money for Twitter spending this afternoon writing down their loans before the weekend. Michael Virks / @michaelvirks : @ZoeSchiffer Good to hear that Elon Musk has reached the John-McAffee-on-homemade-psychadelics- in-Belize stage of paranoia so quickly Der Flecha / @derflecha : A new wave of Twitter employees began posting farewells Thursday, after the deadline passed on an ultimatum Elon Musk issued for them to commit to “long hours at high intensity” or leave https://www.wsj.com/... David Gilbert / @daithaigilbert : This tweet from @ZoeSchiffer about more departures from Twitter shows up on her timeline, but, when you click through to it, it disappears.....is this a glitch? Or similar to the situation when people who shared a tweet from @oneunderscore__ were locked out of their accounts? https://twitter.com/... @rakyll : Long time from now, we'll be all gone. On the other hand, Twitter will forever be remembered as the first tool in human history that taught masses how distributed systems fail. Kaz Weida / @kazweida : Seems like a platform that is home to journalists but is also allowing the government who murdered a journalist to access user data might be a security and safety issue for... well... everyone. https://twitter.com/... Elizabeth Spiers / @espiers : I am not a management genius but if you go into a company as CEO where people already kind of distrust you, then you do a bunch of shit that makes you distrust you more, in public, and then you tell them bend the knee by 5pm or leave, it shouldn't be surprising when they leave. Elizabeth Spiers / @espiers : It's interesting that the narcissist who owns this site now thinks all the journalists will be lost without it—as if Twitter is their primary mode of publishing and not the publications they write for, which is why he hates them. Shashank Joshi / @shashj : Update: we've entered the “40-mile convoy is stuck outside Kyiv” phase of the take-over. https://twitter.com/... @dmofengineering : Hi, distributed systems engineer here. Systems like Twitter are both resilient, and fragile. https://twitter.com/... Brian Wickman / @wickman : after 12 1/2 hardcore years: gun, badge, flair 👋🏻 https://twitter.com/... Dmitry Grozoubinski / @dmitryopines : Some Twitter employees didn't want to stick around working 80+ hour weeks in “extremely hardcore” mode failing to develop imaginary engineering solutions to commercial and political problems as their boss alternates between publicly abusing them and making those problems worse? @over_rated : “He was asking his employees to work just 80 hours a week? What an amateur! It should have been more.” - Most managers in Indian companies @alexhern : “You're saying you know more about running a business than the man who build the Hughes aircraft company? Who broke multiple airspeed records? Who produced Scarface and The Racket? Now shut up and help me put these tissue boxes on my feet to keep out the germs Quinn Nelson / @snazzyq : Elon Musk is pretty much like Steve Jobs with the difference being that Steve Jobs was competent. Chris Hayes / @chrislhayes : Many people are saying Elon Musk should run for RNC chair. @frankieboyle : I suppose without Twitter everyone will just take this behaviour into real life and get punched in the head a lot Johnetta Elzie / @nettaaaaaaaa : Lying until the end is wild 😭 https://twitter.com/... @rmac18 : *people gather in my yard to watch my house burn* me: wow, i've never had this many visitors before Mehdi Hasan / @mehdirhasan : Think of people around the world tonight who need Twitter to get their voices heard, to document human rights abuses and injustices, to get attention, expose war crimes, and more. All of them could be about to be cut off because the world's richest man wanted to own the libs. @peterbrannen1 : If Twitter crashes and you need to find me, the hell you will. I've got a two day head start on you, which is more than I need. I speak a dozen languages, know every local custom, I'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see me again. Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Apropos of nothing in particular. But including contractors Twitter had over 13k people. https://twitter.com/... Brian / @brayniac : After 8+ years, I still don't know what to say in this Tweet. It was one hell of a ride and a highlight of my career. 🫡💙 #LoveWhereYouWorked https://twitter.com/... Bill Gurley / @bgurley : One of the reasons companies routinely do 3 layoffs instead of one is they are almost all afraid to “cut too much.” They fear “hitting bone.” But they VASTLY underestimate how resilient companies actually are. Companies endure. (More). August J. Pollak / @augustjpollak : Imagine being so unbelievably stupid that you dropped $44 billion on a company almost entirely to exert a display of your own ego and power to its employees and in doing so accidentally unionized them https://twitter.com/... Zoë Schiffer / @zoeschiffer : Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: “Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.” Jason Schreier / @jasonschreier : No, Twitter probably won't just disappear tomorrow. What seems far more likely as a result of the staff exodus is that the site becomes much less pleasant to use — weird bugs, more spam, frequent crashes — and so people just stop logging on. Hopefully a viable alternative emerges https://twitter.com/... Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Pink Floyd's “Wish You Were Here,” employees signing off a video call while Musk is pitching his vision, a wave of 🫡 emojis. Inside Decision Day at Twitter where hundreds of people may have just resigned. (w/ @MikeIsaac, @dmccabe & @kateconger) https://www.nytimes.com/... @turmshrub : (dming a mutual I made this week my full legal name) hey man hit me up. i consider you one of my closest friends @g4ys0n : https://twitter.com/... @brndxix : this is unemployed peoples 9/11 Satanjeev Banerjee / @satanjeev : And just like that, after 12 years, I have left Twitter. I have nothing but love for all my fellow tweeps, past and present. A thousand faces and a thousand scenes are flashing through my mind right now - I love you Twitter and I'll forever bleed blue 🫡💙 Daniel Moore / @ildannymoore : I worry less about the site permanently going down and more about how everything that's happening may result in a horrifying security incident @0xfoobar : if ftx can run profitably on 30 employees then why does twitter need 7500 Markos Moulitsas / @markos : Prediction: Musk gets tired of owning the libs by destroying Twitter, unloads it for pennies on what he paid, and someone else brings it back to life. If not, someone will replicate it @buccocapital : Rumor is 75% rejected Elon's “extremely hardcore” proposal Would mean 88% of the company has left/been fired Honestly if he keeps this thing running with 10% of the staff, long enough to rebuild it, that would be bonkers More likely this place explodes. Nice knowing you all @wholemarsblog : I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing drinks in the Kitchen. Elon walked in and asked how many Red Bulls we had left. Then he made everyone who wanted to keep their job shotgun a red bull so they could prove they were “hardcore”. Most just left @alexvoica : Since @elonmusk asked Twitter employees to be “extremely hardcore” or leave, a lot of people have asked me what it really means to be hardcore. I've spent more than a decade in the hardcore scene surrounded by engineers, so here's a brief explainer. https://twitter.com/...
The resignations now reach beyond a general headcount reduction: the related reporting identifies departures among Blue verification, web engineering, infrastructure, and payroll personnel. That makes retention an immediate operating-risk issue for Twitter 2.0, not simply a hiring challenge.
First-order effects
Twitter loses staff responsible for critical infrastructure, web engineering, the Blue verified project, and payroll, while reports warn that some systems no longer have engineer coverage.
Musk’s office closure, badge suspension, and direct appeals to engineers put remaining employees and would-be resignees at the center of an urgent effort to preserve operational continuity.
Second-order effects
Twitter’s external recruiting push for “Twitter 2.0” must fill specialized roles while internal leaders spend time persuading departing engineers to stay.
The loss of the payroll team and critical-system maintainers raises execution pressure across basic employee administration and product operations, alongside the risk of service failures identified by staff and reporters.
Third-order effects
If ultimatums, firings, and rapid attrition remain the operating model, Twitter’s ability to run essential systems will depend less on its nominal workforce size than on retaining personnel with concentrated institutional knowledge.
The episode points to a more fragile post-acquisition model in which workforce restructuring and platform reliability become inseparable, especially when small teams own critical functions.
The trend: Twitter’s restructuring is becoming a test of whether an owner-led, leaner organization can retain the specialized operational knowledge needed to keep a large platform running.
NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: “Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months” 1/
NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.
Musk just asked all software engineers to come to an in person meeting today. Beforehand, they're supposed to email him screenshots of their recent code.
What I'm hearing from Twitter employees; 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.
NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk's Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow.
A few things: 1. Depending on how much critical staff has left & where — it's possible tho not probable the service could shut down at any time & for a short or long time. Relax as it used to do this a lot with the dreaded fail whale logo (see old & new one). It usually restores.…
all the why Elon Musk bought Twitter theories are overthinking it. it's simple. Musk is in a right wing filter bubble. he bought Twitter believing their problems were real & that others felt the same this is what happens when you have a lot of money & live in fantasy land
Scoop: I am hearing far fewer than expected devs hit “yes”. Elon sent out an email relaxing remote working from the former draconian policy. I'm hearing he is having meetings w top engineers to convince them to stay. Sounds like playing hardball does not work. Ofc it doesn't. htt…
TLDR on my scoop here: Preliminary data shows 1,000 -1,200 employees have resigned. Musk sent three (3!!!) emails to staff this morning asking them to bring their code for a technical interview with him. He'd appreciate it if they flew out to HQ for it. https://fortune.com/...
Thinking about this @reckless thought today. Remove the hysteria and the memes and the understandable emotional reaction to what's happening here, and this feels like the most accurate approach to how our relationship with sites and platforms should exist. https://twitter.com/...
Fifteen years(!) and two days after its original launch, I am re-launching https://istwitterdown.com/ Blog post with more context: https://theryanking.com/...
I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for. Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money (lets all be honest). All of those were radically changed or uncertain.
Am hearing the number of Twitter resignations today is likely over 1,000, though unclear as not all are posting their decision. Some teams, such as the engineering team that manages Twitter's core system libraries, are completely gone now. https://www.theverge.com/...
!!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.” https://www.washingtonp…
musk spent Thursday in meetings across different divisions of Twitter, making personal appeals to the *many* employees attempting to resign. His pitch, paraphrased: “I know how to win. If you want to win, stay and work for me.” w/@RMac18 https://www.nytimes.com/...
simply unforgivable that elon is forcing me to either get hot (instagram), get annoying (substack), learn what a server is (mastodon), or become an actual psychopath (linkedin)
Word inside Twitter is that A LOT of employees are not saying “yes” to staying at Musk's “extremely hardcore Twitter 2.0.” He has been meeting today with engineers to convince them to stay. His deadline to decide to stay or leave expired 6 min ago. https://www.theverge.com/...
I resigned today from my job at Twitter. I have nothing but love and admiration for the incredibly kind and talented people I have worked with over these past 4 years. #LoveWhereYouWorked 💙
Twitter dying would be a really big blow to the open source investigation community. It really enabled a lot of sharing of information and collaboration that led to real impact. Bellingcat wouldn't have been able to build an audience without it.
Hot take, if your code looks especially noteworthy in a few screenshots, it's probably too clever, and not ideal as part of a large team or a large-scale, high-stakes service https://twitter.com/...
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%.
Pretty clear a bunch of engineers were not writing code, the codebase is patched crap, and the strategy will be keep the lights on while accelerating a rewrite. Probably looking to acquire something like farcaster rn.
Elon Musk and his team have a list of Twitter employees who signed the offer indicating they want to stay at Twitter 2.0. Those names are in a spreadsheet. Now they're trying to figure out who's NOT on the sheet, who is on parental leave, who's actively resigning in Slack...
Elon: You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you... Twitter workers: *jump out the window* Elon: Uh
this is the most insane request I've ever seen. this is like saying, I run a car company, bring me the most critical individual parts on my desk so we can cut out everything els-oh my GOD wait a second https://twitter.com/...
Reminder that Elon Musk has not worked as a software engineer since the 1990s and even most biographies that fawn all over him admit that the codebase he wrote at Zip2 was worthless. https://twitter.com/...
Allocating inventory to an ad buyer whose promoted tweet has apparently been blocked for copyright violations is a new one for me https://twitter.com/...
Wait a minute, didn't Elon lock all of the offices, disable badges, and tell everyone not to come in until Monday just last night? https://twitter.com/...
Quick suggestion to Twitter employees considering leaking information - make sure you or someone else posts a copy of any e-mail to the internal slack—which cannot be against any rules—and then you have plausible deniability if the leak has any unusual formatting stuff in it.
Hearing that Vine reboot is indeed one of the things on today's agenda at Twitter HQ (that magical place that's open, then closed, then open again). Flashback: https://t.co/XL6kdZnGMY
The Elon-stans aren't sure whether Twitter's an amazingly well-engineered product that will hold up just beautifully under profound maintenance neglect, or if Twitter engineers are lazy and incompetent and couldn't engineer their way out of a paper bag.
Seriously, this whole fucking thing is ridiculous. “I fired half your peers, and then over half of what's left quit, and now I demand you send me screenshots of code so I can..” what?! I mean FFS. Whole thing is beyond incompetent.
So either (a) the offices aren't closed until next week, or (b) getting to the 10th floor is an interview puzzle to keep your job? https://twitter.com/...
This thread speaks truth. This site may be running right now, but when it goes, it's gonna go. That is not an if. That is a when. Make whatever backups you need. Exchange contact info. Make a plan. https://twitter.com/...
Scoop via @kyliebytes — Elon Musk orders all coders to show up at Twitter HQ Friday afternoon, after data suggests 1,000 -1,200 employees have resigned https://fortune.com/...
Elon Musk recently deleted a tweet claiming Twitter was the largest driver of traffic in the internet this is nowhere near true! why did he believe this? because his right wing bubble is obsessed with this platform. he believed it's outsized importance because of them. https://tw…
Yesterday, Musk announced Twitter offices would be closed until Monday. Less than 12 hours later, he's calling all engineers into the office. https://twitter.com/...
I'm reading this email and the part where he goes, “please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code” ... like WHAT https://twitter.com/...
This is also why everyone rooting for Twitter to “functionally fail” are going to be disappointed. The company had 1,000 employees in 2012 and had 200 MAUs. And the systems are way better now. If they go back to that count they will survive. You are NOT seeing the “fail whale.”
Twitter will not end. As a consequence of internal conflict, it will gradually transform into a series of successor polities, driven by the idea of Twitterness. There will also survive an East Twitter that, weakened by the onslaught of new social media, will continue its legacy.
Reminder that in some of the documents we reported on weeks ago, Elon's plan was always to get Twitter's staff to just 10% of what it was before acquisition through firings and creating an environment in which massive attrition would take place
Ex-Twitter employee @peterclowes on why he left Twitter hits a bunch of the points I've mentioned before. 1. No compelling vision for the product besides squeezing money out of power users. 2. Work in crunch mode for limited to no financial upside. 3. Laid off too many, too fast.…
These people who think he's playing 4D chess are the new QAnon class. They keep deciphering his shit looking for hidden meaning or genius when the reality is much more simple: the motherfucker is just really that dumb. https://twitter.com/...
What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté.
My advice to save @Twitter: Hire a competent CEO Bring back key employees/stop trashing them Extricate yourself from running the company Stop tweeting crazy 💩that alienates creators Separate yourself from deranged RW consp theories Replace your enabling advisors who are using u h…
Say what you will about Elon's management style, but before he took over all you guys posted was “ugh another day on this hell site” and now you're all like “ah twitter the extraordinary place where I met all my best friends, started my career, had sex for the first time”
i get this point and agree with the spirit of it but what it doesn't consider is that the reason people think twitter is going to die is because there currently aren't enough technical humans to fix problems should they occur. not philosophical issue but a logistical one. https:/…
Twitter employees used to joke: “Twitter is the company that can't kill itself.” Everyone speculating Twitter might die now, it's not happening. It's like the jellyfish “Turritopsis dohrnii” which is ‘biologically immortal.’ This chaos is just part of its DNA & how it thrives.
I hate the idea of Twitter potentially failing during the Iranian protests. It's played a huge role in amplifying protestors' voices & keeping their struggle front & center globally. https://twitter.com/...
What's happening to Twitter is not the same as what happened to MySpace, LiveJournal, Tumblr, or other faded sites. People gradually moved from those sites on their own accord to better options. What's happening to Twitter is a controlled demolition.
pre-elon twitter: pls free me from this hellsite post-elon twitter: Everyday with you all has been a gift. I owe my career, my friendships, and my marriage to this community. I've fostered compassion and activism each and everyday with you all, fighting the good fight (1/40)
Every single one of these dozens of items is a real threat, known to anyone who manages systems with millions (or hundreds of millions) of users, and one will pop up nearly every day. And none are issues you'd find at, say, a car company. Only a fool would ignore these risks. htt…
True story: Twitter once tried to acquire Instagram! The two were like peanut butter and jelly. Did you know that in the old days if you posted an Insta link to Twitter, the image automatically displayed on here? Then Facebook bought Insta and killed that feature. https://twitter…
I know Elon Musk's whole reputation is built on taking credit for work he didn't do, but this is really taking it to another level. https://twitter.com/...
We should probably have a serious discussion about the ease with which a billionaire haphazardly purchased & immediately destroyed a company that employed 7,500 people and facilitated essential communication for hundreds of millions.
As @dellcam discovered, Twitter seems to be stopping users from posting the URL for mastodon in tweets. I just tried it and got this message https://twitter.com/...
7. Will life go on? Why yes & so may Twitter if Elon gets his head out of his red-pilled ass, focuses and stops with a performative weak sauce Trump impersonation. Even Trump sucks at being Trump these days (see last speech). In any case, you can stay or go. It's a free Internet.…
A new wave of Twitter employees began posting farewells Thursday, after the deadline passed on an ultimatum Elon Musk issued for them to commit to “long hours at high intensity” or leave https://www.wsj.com/...
This tweet from @ZoeSchiffer about more departures from Twitter shows up on her timeline, but, when you click through to it, it disappears.....is this a glitch? Or similar to the situation when people who shared a tweet from @oneunderscore__ were locked out of their accounts? htt…
Long time from now, we'll be all gone. On the other hand, Twitter will forever be remembered as the first tool in human history that taught masses how distributed systems fail.
Seems like a platform that is home to journalists but is also allowing the government who murdered a journalist to access user data might be a security and safety issue for... well... everyone. https://twitter.com/...
I am not a management genius but if you go into a company as CEO where people already kind of distrust you, then you do a bunch of shit that makes you distrust you more, in public, and then you tell them bend the knee by 5pm or leave, it shouldn't be surprising when they leave.
It's interesting that the narcissist who owns this site now thinks all the journalists will be lost without it—as if Twitter is their primary mode of publishing and not the publications they write for, which is why he hates them.
Some Twitter employees didn't want to stick around working 80+ hour weeks in “extremely hardcore” mode failing to develop imaginary engineering solutions to commercial and political problems as their boss alternates between publicly abusing them and making those problems worse?
“You're saying you know more about running a business than the man who build the Hughes aircraft company? Who broke multiple airspeed records? Who produced Scarface and The Racket? Now shut up and help me put these tissue boxes on my feet to keep out the germs
Offices will reopen on November 21st. In the meantime: “Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.”
After 8+ years, I still don't know what to say in this Tweet. It was one hell of a ride and a highlight of my career. 🫡💙 #LoveWhereYouWorked https://twitter.com/...
Think of people around the world tonight who need Twitter to get their voices heard, to document human rights abuses and injustices, to get attention, expose war crimes, and more. All of them could be about to be cut off because the world's richest man wanted to own the libs.
If Twitter crashes and you need to find me, the hell you will. I've got a two day head start on you, which is more than I need. I speak a dozen languages, know every local custom, I'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see me again.
One of the reasons companies routinely do 3 layoffs instead of one is they are almost all afraid to “cut too much.” They fear “hitting bone.” But they VASTLY underestimate how resilient companies actually are. Companies endure. (More).
Pink Floyd's “Wish You Were Here,” employees signing off a video call while Musk is pitching his vision, a wave of 🫡 emojis. Inside Decision Day at Twitter where hundreds of people may have just resigned. (w/ @MikeIsaac, @dmccabe & @kateconger) https://www.nytimes.com/...
Imagine being so unbelievably stupid that you dropped $44 billion on a company almost entirely to exert a display of your own ego and power to its employees and in doing so accidentally unionized them https://twitter.com/...
No, Twitter probably won't just disappear tomorrow. What seems far more likely as a result of the staff exodus is that the site becomes much less pleasant to use — weird bugs, more spam, frequent crashes — and so people just stop logging on. Hopefully a viable alternative emerges…
And just like that, after 12 years, I have left Twitter. I have nothing but love for all my fellow tweeps, past and present. A thousand faces and a thousand scenes are flashing through my mind right now - I love you Twitter and I'll forever bleed blue 🫡💙
Prediction: Musk gets tired of owning the libs by destroying Twitter, unloads it for pennies on what he paid, and someone else brings it back to life. If not, someone will replicate it
Rumor is 75% rejected Elon's “extremely hardcore” proposal Would mean 88% of the company has left/been fired Honestly if he keeps this thing running with 10% of the staff, long enough to rebuild it, that would be bonkers More likely this place explodes. Nice knowing you all
I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing drinks in the Kitchen. Elon walked in and asked how many Red Bulls we had left. Then he made everyone who wanted to keep their job shotgun a red bull so they could prove they were “hardcore”. Most just left
Since @elonmusk asked Twitter employees to be “extremely hardcore” or leave, a lot of people have asked me what it really means to be hardcore. I've spent more than a decade in the hardcore scene surrounded by engineers, so here's a brief explainer. https://twitter.com/...
I don't think Twitter will last through the weekend. Twitter is restricting employee access to all its buildings through the weekend with no reason given. The entire android team resigned. The world cup,the largest sporting event in the world, starts this weekend.
Another sw engineer was telling me he was *really* excited when Elon took over, and could not wait to work with him. Then was confused why Elon treated Twitter so poorly. Eg didn't even talk with staff. Then this person was fired as part of the 50%. Why let go even supporters?
Twitter *cannot* afford to lose that many devs and keep operating. Heck, they have barely started hiring new ones, and those hires will not come through the door for several weeks! I'm assuming Elon will have to throw money at this: - Retention bonuses - Short-term contracts
Unless something changes, Twitter's engineering workforce could be down by 90%, in just 3 weeks (!!!). Elon fired 50%. Then fired a few more for correcting him. Now 80% of the remaining 50% could take severance. Here's what I think will happen:
Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter may be a disaster so far, but at least he got rid of all the bot spam https://twitter.com/search https://twitter.com/...
Elon's main issue to fix on Twitter according to him is the bots, but it's only been a couple of weeks since he took over and I'm already getting at least twice as many crypto bot replies and scams in my DMs. Weird how firing most of the content mods doesn't help fight bots
As we're all very aware, folks on visas are stuck, so thats who makes up most of the roughly 25% (or less than 1,000....) expected to stay. The actual impact is not yet known — there have been no internal comms about what comes next. We're nearly 2 hours post deadline.
Staying at a social media company 10+ years at middle six figures is, simply, middle class welfare. I realize it's frustrating because well over half the UMC workforce is welfare, but that needs to be upended too https://twitter.com/...
I still remember the first day I walked into Twitter for my interview and the recruiter walked me through the commons. This was 8.5 years ago Some places and people leave an impression on your life. There have been several such moments It's been real y'all! #lovewhereyouworked 🫡 …
After 5 incredible years at Twitter, today I'm resigning. What a ride! Twitter was my dream job & I'm so fortunate to have lived it. Until next time, ✌🏽 & 💙. #LoveWhereYouWorked 🫡 https://twitter.com/...
Today was fucking hard — after almost 4 years, I've decided to leave Twitter. Sending ❤️ to all those who decided to leave and those who will stay. It was a real privilege working with you all and I've become a better person for it. Thank you 🫡 #LoveWhereYouWorked https://twitter…
The saddest thing when reading resignation tweets from #lovewhereyouworked is how many people have been at Twitter for 8, 10, 12 years. The sheer amount of institutional knowledge Elon is driving away is incalculable. Thank you to everyone who's leaving for everything you made.
I think Elon is going to try run twitter on 10% of the staff just to prove it can be done. Honestly, I'm rooting for him simply because I like the website that much.
Elon really bought Twitter, walked in confidently like he was gonna nail this shit, fired a majority of employees, chaotically deployed shitty ideas, destroyed security infrastructure, imploded ad revenue then decided he doesn't wanna lead the company within TWO WEEKS MAN
Not sure Twitter is ending (always iffy on stuff like this involving mega corporations) but hopefully by now we can realize that just because Elon Musk and his crew are rich, it doesn't mean they are good or smart in any traditional way.
few outcomes: 1) it's dead 2) elon sells it 3) elon humbles the fuck up and lets existing engineers run the ship, begs others to come back, and tries to rebuild either way, Twitter won't be the same
elon bought twitter to completely ruin the website to cause an exodus of users back to tumblr to restore it to it's once holy roman empire status of social media
Twitter isn't going to disappear overnight to never be heard from people, relax. Big banks hold a ton of the debt and they will want something for their money. The site will remain online or will limp along until someone takes it over... Elon or no Elon.
Elon Musk says that Twitter's best engineers are staying at the company and that he's “not super worried” about the platform shutting down. https://twitter.com/...