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People are singing their last birdsongs on Twitter, as some brace for what they fear will be a final farewell to the platform whose workforce has shrunk dramatically in the few weeks it’s been owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
While it’s unlikely that Twitter will shut down entirely, departing employees are warning of service outages, glitches and safety risks.
Plus, there are concerns about the platform’s capacity to handle traffic during big events, such as the World Cup kicking off this weekend.
On Thursday, more employees quit after Musk gave them an ultimatum: Either they sign on to a new “hardcore” era or leave with three months severance. The fresh departures came just two weeks after Musk laid off half of the company. He’s also eliminated thousands of contractor jobs and fired some employees who criticized him publicly. Without cost cuts and increased revenue, he says, bankruptcy is possible.
Some former employees who chose not to sign onto Musk’s new vision took to Twitter to explain their decisions.
“I left because I no longer knew what I was staying for,” Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer who resigned on Thursday, wrote in a thread. “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.”
Clowes noted any employee who chose to remain would have had to sign away their option to take severance before seeing their offer, and without a clear picture of the future Musk has planned.
