Elon Musk: Twitter may shut down over the weekend after takeover

Hundreds more employees from its increasingly disgruntled workforce resigned following Musk’s latest aggressive staff email, which on Wednesday demanded workers click “yes” or “no” to being part of the company’s “extremely hardcore” future.

Resignation would be presumed of workers who had not selected “yes” by the end of the day and they would be offered a severance package.

Only seven per cent of employees who took part in a workplace app Blind survey following the email said they selected to stay on for the “hardcore” conditions, ABC News reported.

Meanwhile, 42 per cent of 180 workers chose the answer: “Taking exit option, I’m free!”

The email came less than two weeks after Musk laid off half of Twitter’s workforce – about 3700 employees – as well as many contract workers.

The social media site has now been filled with speculation surrounding its future, given a multitude of employees across departments crucial to its operation have resigned.

“I don’t think Twitter will last through the weekend,” one Twitter commentator predicted.

“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,” they added.

Critical engineers in roles that keep the site running have all resigned, according to their post.

“I can’t see how this can last beyond a few days.”

The tags “RIPTwitter”, “GoodByeTwitter” and “TwitterDown” were also trending as the company continued unravelling ahead of the weekend.

According to The Verge, employees have been told they won’t have access to Twitter offices over the weekend, with badge access being temporarily shut off.

Remaining employees told the publication they expected the site would soon begin “breaking” as multiple critical engineering teams almost or entirely walk off the job.

The team behind maintaining Twitter’s core system libraries – used by every engineer at the company – resigned.

“You cannot run Twitter without this team,” an employee told the publication.

Before Musk proposed the ultimatum, there was about 2,900 employees remaining after he sacked about half of its original 7,500-strong workforce shortly after the takeover.

Musk has claimed to be unphased by the mass exodus.

“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” he tweeted Thursday evening.

An employee Musk once described a “genius” described what his life was like after quitting.

“This morning, instead of maintaining the systems that keep these tweets flowing, I walked the dog, made cinnamon rolls, and dug in on my backlog of recruiter messages. This afternoon, instead of maintaining the systems that keep these tweets flowing, maybe a nap?” he wrote.

It has also been reported that due to employees responsible for processing resignations resigning, former workers still have access to Twitter’s internal systems.

A head salute emoji has been broadly used on Twitter and apparently a slack channel as a way for employees to indicate their plan to resign.

Companies and prominent identities across the social media site have leant into the drama, with Sydney Water taking the opportunity to weigh in.

“Sounds like Twitter is going down the sewer. If it does, we’ll be here to deal with it,” its tweet read.

Twitter does not have a media department to contact for comment.

Originally published as Twitter not expected to last the weekend after Elon Musk’s savage ultimatum email