Twitter has lost thousands of employees from layoffs and resignations since Elon Musk bought the company, but the recent departure of one of its employees seems a bit personal.
After an exchange on the social media site about its poor performance recently, the CEO announced that Eric Frohnhoefer, an engineer at Twitter, had been fired.
Frohnhoefer Was Fired For Trying To Correct His Former Boss
According to The Verge, it all started when Musk tweeted out an apology for Twitter's slow performance in many countries, implying that it is because the app does a thousand poorly batched procedure calls.
This means that he believes that the Twitter for Android app was performing subpar because it has to reach and connect to several servers and wait before it gets a response.
Frohnhoefer, who worked at the company for six years as a software engineer, quoted the billionaire's tweet, claiming that his statement was incorrect.
The engineer provided an explanation why Musk's information was false, stating that the social network makes no remote procedure calls, but instead, it makes around 20 background requests during startup.
Musk then told the former employee how it is not great for him to not know that there are about 1,200 microservices called when using the Twitter app, which Frohnhoefer once again disagreed with.
The back and forth between the two went on for quite a while, spread over many different Twitter threads, but Musk still had the final word in the argument by later announcing that Frohnhoefer was fired.
NBC News reports that the former employee apparently did not receive a notice of his firing, but by early Monday evening, Frohnhoefer tweeted a photo showing that he has been officially locked out of the company.
The former Twitter employee did not immediately respond to their request for a few words as it took about five hours before his access was removed from the company computer.
Read More: Sen. Markey Urges Elon Musk To Fix His Companies Before Congress Does It Instead
The Recent Public Firing Adds Fuel To The CEO's Layoff Streak Controversy
Due to the very public firing of Frohnhoefer, Musk received a lot of pushback from people outside the company and from other Twitter employees.
Twitter's tech lead Sasha Solomon called out the CEO for criticizing the company when he laid off most of their teams, even accusing Musk of not knowing how GraphQL works.
Because of this, Solomon, on Monday evening, tweeted that she was also fired, but did not explicitly state if it was because she engaged in the thread of the Musk and Frohnhoefer fight.
These public layoffs come around after Musk cut a huge portion of Twitter's staff when he took over, which led to many controversial content moderation decisions for the social media, NBC News says.
Since the argument, Musk still has not taken any of the software engineer's suggestions on how to improve the Twitter for Android app's performance.
However, after getting laid off, Frohnhoefer told The Verge that it was not smart for him to confront Musk the way he did on the social platform.
Since he lost his job, Twitter's former engineer reportedly had already been encouraged to seek out and apply for jobs at other tech companies.
Related Article: Twitter Lays Off Thousands of Contractors Without Notice
