It seems that Elon Musk is treating Twitter like a game show with multiple elimination rounds. Do or say anything wrong, and you're out. The Tesla CEO is planning more job cuts for the future, according to Engadget. The company's sales and partnership teams may be in trouble, which will be determined as early as Monday.
Continuous Shrinking of the Workforce
Twitter is growing smaller and smaller, as Musk is losing employees at an alarmingly continuous rate, both through layoffs and resignations. Earlier, several employees decided to leave the company, as Musk tried to implement an "extremely hardcore" work environment. This did not stop the tech billionaire from further laying off workers.
Robin Wheeler, head of ad sales, and Maggie Suniewick, the company's partnerships chief, were recently fired from the company. This was after the two pushed back regarding Musk's order to remove more workers. With 1200 more employees leaving after the high-intensity demand from the boss, Twitter might start falling apart.
Reports say that on Saturday, users have already seen changes in Twitter's automated copyright strike system. One instance was a user posting the whole "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" in 50 tweet thread. The tweet lasted around a whole day before the platform noticed and took the post down.
Rumors of Shutting Down
Although there are no official reports, rumors have been spreading on other social media platforms that Twitter will soon be gone. Users are preparing for the worst, as employees leaving the company might mean that Twitter will no longer operate properly. Warnings of service outages, glitches and safety risks have been stated by employees.
Users are already urging others to download their archived data, since an outage or breach may happen due to a lack of employees. Twitter's data centers may also be in trouble, since there's not enough workforce to make them run efficiently. A former employee stated that not enough people can deal with a network cable being disconnected, or a hard drive getting filled up.
The reduction of employees has also been felt in the form of rampant derogatory speech. There has been a wave of racial slurs and antisemitic remarks throughout the platform, seeing those in charge of monitoring insensitive or illegal content were either laid off or resigned. Musk's vision of "free speech" may have also contributed to the issue.
The tech billionaire tends to make sudden announcements about changes on Twitter. Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety, said that policies defined by a "unilateral edict" has almost no need for a trust and safety function. Twitter may now also be susceptible to hacks since employees under security, engineering, and content moderation have left or were fired.
According to NPR, there are also concerns about the platform handling big events. Since normal functions are already impacted, a surge in Twitter activity may be too much to handle for the remaining employees. Perhaps the Twitter users' concern about the platform shutting down may not be entirely unjustified.
