Following the mass resignation of employees, Twitter ‘s offices remain closed and the remaining staff have been locked out.
Twitter is going through a very critical moment after its employees decided to resign en masse by not accepting the extreme working conditions imposed by Elon Musk , the company’s current owner and CEO .
After the 3,500 layoffs that occurred with the arrival of the tycoon to the board of directors of the social network, a new massive wave of employees also decided to leave, including several of the engineers in charge of keeping the platform afloat.
The crisis in the company is so great that even some of the few employees who decided to stay do not believe that it will survive and have even indicated a specific amount of time in which Twitter will die: just one week. Travis Akers , a journalist for Newsweek , reported that a company worker does not believe that the social network will go beyond the next 7 days and that it will inevitably disappear.
From one of the remaining Twitter employees: “It (Twitter) has about a week left before it’s dead.”
— Travis Akers (@travisakers) November 18, 2022
Twitter in one of its worst moments
Earlier this week, Musk gave Twitter workers who survived the initial purge of 3,500 employees an ultimatum: Either align with the harder work pace and long, intense work hours, or they would have to leave the company with an indemnification. Added to the cancellation of remote work, several of the workers considered it best to say goodbye to the company and resigned en masse.
Last Thursday, November 17, the Twitter offices closed, a measure that will last until next Monday the 21st for fear that the company’s former employees will manipulate the social network before leaving, according to Zoë Schiffer , editor-in-chief of Platformer .
” Twitter has just advised employees that, effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and access to ID cards is suspended. No details have been given as to why. We have heard this is due to that Elon Musk and his team are terrified that the employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they are still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they have to cut off access to ,” the journalist said.
We’re hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they’re still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022
For his part, Alex Heath , editor of The Verge , reported that despite the fact that access to the headquarters has been cut off for many of the workers until November 21, several of them still have access to the Twitter systems . “Hundreds and hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems and some speculate that it’s because the employees in charge of managing that access have also resigned,” Heath said .
Story to be updated soon with more: Am hearing that several “critical” infra engineering teams at Twitter have completely resigned. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” one current engineer tells me of one such group. Also, Twitter has shut off badge access to its offices.
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 18, 2022
Layoffs on Twitter are beginning to be felt on the social network
The engineers that were part of Twitter and the few that still remain there warned that there will be big problems with the operation of the social network due to large volumes of traffic. Ben Krueger , a reliability engineer at Twitter , told MIT Technology Review that a situation would be replicated every time a massive event or world-shaking news takes place.
The engineer points out that the website outages will accumulate until eventually Twitter becomes unusable, a situation that will be exacerbated by the extreme fatigue and overwork of the engineers. In fact, several users have reported the presence of more outages on the platform during the night of November 17, which could be due to the increase in traffic due to the trending topic #RIPTwitter .