Twitter has informed its employees that the social media platform’s offices will be closed until next week.
No reason behind the temporary closure has been disclosed, but a message to workers has said that Twitter expects to reopen its offices on Monday.
The same message also asked staff to “continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.”
The closure comes in the wake of reports of an exodus of staff from Twitter, after its new owner Elon Musk asked them to commit to being “hardcore” and working long hours or walk away.
Twitter announced earlier in November that it was looking to cut 50 per cent of its headcount following the $44 billion (£37 billion) takeover, with Musk saying that staff who didn’t commit to staying on under the new conditions by November 17 would leave with a severance package of three months’ wages.
The social site had a workforce that was roughly 7,500 strong at the time of the takeover and many of these are expected to have left or be on the way out, while most of its thousands of contract workers have also been made redundant.
An anonymous Twitter insider told the BBC that everyone in their team had been sacked and that they expected “less than 2,000 people” to be left at the company by the time “the dust clears today”.
The anonymous source said: “The manager of that team, his manager was terminated. And then that manager's manager was terminated. The person above that was one of the execs terminated on the first day. So, there's nobody left in that chain of command.”
Another source from inside Twitter said that they’d been prepared to work lengthy hours but had chosen to leave following threatening emails from their new boss.
“I didn't want to work for someone who threatened us over email multiple times about only 'exceptional tweeps should work here' when I was already working 60-70 hours weekly,” the source said.
Bruce Daisley, the former vice-president of the social platform, said that former Twitter engineers had been claiming the site could “fail as soon as Monday” given the scale of the exodus of core teams.
Daisley said: “There's a large number of features that really seem to be predicated on having engineers on site. If those engineers have gone, then it does threaten the sustainability of the product.
“So, there's a lot of people posting where else you can find them online.”
Despite reports of internal chaos, Musk boasted on Friday that the platform had hit “another all-time high in Twitter usage”.
The business magnate also insisted that he was “not super worried” about the prospect of the site failing, explaining that “the best people are staying”.
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
