In an unexpected turn of events, Twitter has informed its employees that offices will be temporarily closed immediately and likely set to reopen on Monday 21 November.
While there was no official clarification for the reason behind this staggering announcement, a string of events proceeded the decision.
Twitter Set to Lose a Huge Number of Employees
Elon Musk’s push to improve Twitter to what he refers to as “Twitter 2.0” came with unclear requests to the company’s employees.
In an official email to Twitter employees, Musk stated what he needed employees to contribute for this vision to be achieved.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” Musk wrote.
Employees were then given until the following work day to confirm staying at Twitter as part of this journey or to decline the new conditions. Nonresponse to the email would be deemed a negative response and would be followed with three months of severance pay.
While exact numbers are currently unknown, the temporary shutdown of the company’s offices and reactions of employees on social media has led to speculation of what could be a huge loss of employees at Twitter.
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%.
— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) November 18, 2022
Following this ordeal on Thursday, several employees started using the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked to signal their departure from the company.
Where is Twitter After Shutting Its Doors?
Among the employees cutting ties with Twitter is a large number of engineers, directly responsible for addressing bugs on the platform.
This further amplified users’ concern that the platform could become unstable, which was seemingly confirmed by DownDetector which reported an increase in user outages on Thursday.
Many celebrities and government officials are already preparing for the possibility of unfixable problems on the platform, instructing followers to follow them on alternative social media channels just in case.
Elon Musk seems unaffected amidst the chaos.He even stated on the social media platform that Twitter usage has been at an all-time high, laying to rest speculation that the world is witnessing its demise.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
A more conclusive overview of what is occurring will be available when Twitter reopens its doors. Until Monday!
