Twitter Engineers Reportedly Fear Outages As More Employees Exit

Elon Musk's recent email stating that employees had only 24 hours to either click a button in agreement with his "extremely hardcore" work demands or resign appears to have spectacularly backfired, at least based on reports leaking from Twitter's current and now-former ranks. The deadline for accepting that mandate has passed, and no one knew what to expect at first. Employees reported still having access to their company laptops and accounts even though they didn't click the button, and reports soon surfaced claiming that the demands didn't work as planned.

As many had already anticipated, Elon Musk's method of leadership has proven unpopular with Twitter's workers; half were laid off within days of him taking ownership, and others since exited the company for various reasons. Multiple reports citing insiders and internal Slack messages reportedly show that hundreds of Twitter employees chose to resign rather than continue with Twitter under Musk's dramatic and cruel work demands. Many of those people are engineers, according to the same insiders and Slack messages, and that could rapidly speed up the rate at which the platform becomes unstable.

We've been hearing concerns about Twitter's infrastructure since the early days of Musk's ownership — that is, from around two weeks ago. Early on, some insiders claimed that in an effort to cut costs, Musk had a team looking at which parts of the company's infrastructure could be slashed. This effort is supposedly known internally as the Deep Cuts Plan, and the insiders claimed it may involve cutting extra server capacity. Assuming that has happened, it may make the platform vulnerable to usage spikes.

That would make Elon Musk's claim that usage is at an all-time high less than good news, as a spike in users amid a drastic downturn in ad revenue and a significantly smaller workforce can mean big troubles down the line. If new reports from inside Twitter are accurate, though, it seems the company is now cruising down the road toward outages, and it may have Musk to blame. Both CNBC and The Verge report that Musk's email demand has resulted in many engineers leaving the company — a situation so dire that Musk has reportedly arranged to meet with some of them in order to get them to stay.

CNBC said it has spoken to multiple employees who decided to resign rather than stay for Musk's "hardcore" Twitter 2.0 plans, and that internal Slack messages showed "hundreds" of employees using the salute emoji, which signifies that they plan to leave, as well. One source claimed that some key engineers who are responsible for keeping "critical infrastructure" up and running have decided to exit Twitter, "leaving the company at serious risk of being able to recover" if a system goes down.