Elon Musk sacked a Twitter employee via a tweet on Monday after he contested the new CEO's remark on the microblogging site being slow on Android devices. The billionaire, however, deleted the tweet later.

However, the Android developer, who goes by the handle Eric Frohnhoefer, was offered jobs by social media platform Reddit and several other companies on the same thread. These companies assured him, “We won’t treat you like this.”

There were also several tweeple who called out Frohnhoefer’s “unprofessional behaviour” and urged firms to not hire him.

Eric, this thread is absolutely bonkers. We’re hiring senior and staff Android engineers at Reddit. We won’t treat you like this.

— Jameson (@softwarejameson) November 14, 2022

This comes after Musk, who calls himself a "free speech absolutist", on Sunday tweeted his apology to users for Twitter being super slow in many countries. “App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” he said.

To this, Frohnhoefer replied saying he spent six years working on Twitter for Android and can say what Musk tweeted was wrong, leading to a spat between the two in a series of tweets.

"Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?" Musk tweeted.

A few others stepped into the argument to suggest that Frohnhoefer should have taken up the matter privately to which the latter responded, “maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe use Slack or email.” Several others, meanwhile, took the opportunity to begin a memefest.

Monday morning, Frohnhoefer was fired and he retweeted that post and included a saluting emoji that many employees used when they were laid off earlier this month.

Also Read: Elon Musk fires around 3,000 contract workers at Twitter without prior notice

Another engineer, Ben Leib, was also fired after he replied to the same tweet, to say “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he's talking about.” Leib, who worked at Twitter for a decade, confirmed to Bloomberg that he was fired on Sunday.

A constant back-and-forth has been on at Twitter since Musk took over the social media giant in a $44 billion deal and, in one of his first moves, laid off nearly 50 percent of the company’s 7,500-strong workforce.

Musk claims to have offered a severance package to the staff that were let go but several employees in the US have reportedly filed suit saying he went back on his promises. Not just human resources issues but others including tech have been crawling up ever since the billionaire set foot as the “Chief Twit” or “Complaint Hotline Operator.” For instance, Twitter Blue — paid verification service — has been rolled out and rolled back and so was ‘official label’ several times.

Also Read: Twitter, Meta mass layoffs: What the Indian law says about severance package, notice period and more

Musk's moves have also led to concerns that San Francisco-based Twitter is vulnerable to product breakdowns or technical outages. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Twitter implemented another coding freeze, halting product updates to the app, and employees weren’t given a clear reason why.

First Published:Nov 15, 2022 3:31 PM IST