Hundreds of Twitter’s remaining employees have resigned ahead of Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company saying “Good Bye Twitter.”
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be” while Twitter trends heavily with “Goodbye Twitter” and “Rest in Peace Twitter”.
The microblogging platform was streaming with hundreds of memes and the fresh walkout of Twitter company’s employees comes after Musk recently fired dozens of employees who criticized or mocked him in tweets and internal messages.
Musk then set a deadline of 5 PM ET on Thursday for all employees to respond “yes” on a Google form if they want to stay for what he is calling “Twitter 2.0;” otherwise, today would be their final day of work and they would receive a severance package. After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum.
Michael Swartz said, “Musk turned one of the biggest sites on the internet into a crater within a month. I never want to hear anyone call him other than a dipshit ever again.
Twitter HQ
RIP Twitter”
Musk turned one of the biggest sites on the internet into a crater within a month.
I never want to hear anyone call him other than a dipshit ever again.
Twitter HQ
RIP Twitter
— Michael Swartz (@Maswartz226) November 18, 2022
Everyone on Twitter tweeting about how Twitter’s dead pic.twitter.com/gcdUDAN0IZ
— greg (@greg16676935420) November 18, 2022
Bish writes, “Goodbye Twitter, been a good run. #RIPTwitter
Goodbye twitter, been a good run. #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/fkkUZWz2oQ
— Bish 🗽 (@thebishundercov) November 18, 2022
— David Leavitt (@David_Leavitt) November 18, 2022
— Patel Meet (@mn_google) November 18, 2022
“I’m not pressing the button,” one departing employee posted in Slack. “My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
“My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, while Musk had fired half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front-end teams that route engineering requests to the correct back-end services.
The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.
Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.
In a tweet Thursday evening, Musk said: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.”
He also responded to “Goodbye Twitter” memes with this meme. It appears the people who made Twitter incredible have now left, and what is remaining is yet to be seen.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
