Half of the original 7,500 Twitter employees have already disappeared, and 80 percent of all contract service providers have also been terminated. Now a new exodus begins: Apparently hundreds of employees do not want to prove that they are "extremely hardcore".
A new employee exodus has started on Twitter in the past few hours. "I may be extraordinary, but damn I'm just not hardcore," one staffer explained of her decision. She was referring to an announcement by the new Twitter boss Elon Musk, according to which the company had to be "extremely hardcore" in order to be able to compete.
Musk prepared employees for "long, high-intensity work days" in a memo on Wednesday. "Only exceptional performance is rated as sufficient," said the new Twitter boss - and gave the workforce a deadline for submitting a corresponding work commitment online by Thursday afternoon (local time). Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired with three months' salary as severance pay.
According to various reports, several hundred employees rejected this ultimatum - and thus significantly more than expected, as the British "Guardian" reports. According to this, even the operation of the short message service is said to be in danger, since the departures again include important employees who are responsible for correcting faults and errors in the app and web version of Twitter.
According to the "Washington Post", several critical systems are to be looked after by just one, two or no software engineers at all. Musk had previously laid off half of the original 7,500 employees and terminated 80 percent of all contract service providers.
One of the signs of a larger exodus is that Musk relaxed a strict office requirement on Thursday that he had ordered last week. In an email to the workforce, the billionaire wrote that those who perform the most and have the permission of their direct superiors can continue to work from home. "It feels like they're trying to convince some employees to stay," the Financial Times quoted an employee as saying.
A little later, the industry journalist Zoe Schiffer reported another email in which the Twitter management informed the remaining employees that all offices were temporarily closed and were not accessible even with an electronic door opener. According to anonymous sources, operation of the employee version of the Twitter app is already significantly restricted. As the "Guardian" continues to write, the error messages of the publicly accessible version should also increase. However, the app and website are still accessible. Trending on the charts
Musk took over Twitter at the end of October for 44 billion dollars (around 43 billion euros) and immediately fired the top floor. A little later he dismissed around half of the 7,500 employees and announced several innovations. However, the conversion to a profitable platform is extremely chaotic: Musk only postponed the new subscription model with the blue verification symbol until the end of November on Tuesday. He was reacting to a flood of fake profiles on Twitter. Several major corporations have suspended advertising on the network over concerns about Twitter's development.
