Twitter offices began shutting down on Thursday for a few days as hundreds of employees resigned after the new boss Elon Musk gave the staff an ultimatum to commit to an "extremely hardcore" work environment involving "long hours at high intensity" or leave with severance, according to multiple reports. According to internal Slack messages seen by CNBC, engineers and other employees posted goodbye messages to a “watercooler” chat group in the run-up to 5 pm Thursday deadline that Musk set just a day earlier.

While it remains unclear exactly how many employees have put in their papers, reports put the number at a few hundred.

According to The Verge, Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the Thursday deadline to choose between hardcore work and leaving. The latest resignation wave leaves the Twitter workforce size even smaller, which was already trimmed after Musk decided to lay off nearly half of the 7,500 employees in October as he took over, followed by multiple voluntary exits.

Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.

“The train has started in #social-watercooler,” an employee told CNBC, referring to a Slack group that Twitter employees have used in recent weeks to notify others that they are leaving.

The mass resignation wave follows Musk's mail on Wednesday to all Twitter employees, telling them he expects “long hours at high intensity” from them if they wanted to stay. He gave them a 5 pm ET deadline to confirm.

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Musk is said to have followed up on the matter with a few emails telling managers to meet staff in person once a week or at least monthly and that managers could be fired for allowing employees to work remotely unless those employees, in his view, can be deemed as “excellent” or “exceptional.”

“Entire teams representing critical infrastructure are voluntarily departing the company, leaving the company at serious risk of being able to recover,” an engineer, who said they were handing in their resignation on Thursday, wrote to CNBC.

Esther Crawford, who works on early-stage products at Twitter, tweeted a farewell message saying, “To all the Tweeps who decided to make today your last day: thanks for being incredible teammates through the ups and downs,” she tweeted. “I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

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First Published:Nov 18, 2022 8:00 AM IST