[Update: The proportion of Twitter employees who left after Musk's announcement was about 1,000, meaning approximately 2,700 employees remain. This only came out after this whole story broke, but I have posted the correction anyway for thoroughness.]
[Note: I originally planned to send this out as a text message update to my family. I have since decided to make it a blog entry instead.]
Prior to leaving Twitter, my mother asked me to keep me in the loop about what was going on with Musk’s reign. Today, she reminded me again to keep her informed. So in accordance with my promise: Mom, I have more Twitter news.
This broke out when I was asleep, and started when my family was having dinner. It’s possible that more will have happened between the time I started writing this and the time I put this on my website.
So early Wednesday morning (god, it feels like a week already) Elon Musk sent out an email asking all Twitter employees if they were willing to stay on for Musk’s “breakthrough Twitter 2.0”, saying that it would mean “working long hours at high intensity”, and giving them a Thursday 5 pm ET deadline to click on a link to confirm they were staying. The deadline came, and only ~25% clicked the link. Conversely, ~75% of remaining Twitter staff decided not to stay, including most of the people working on Musk’s precious Twitter Blue subscription program and the entire payroll department.
As of 6 pm ET, Musk has locked all employees out of all Twitter offices. The offices are reopening Monday, November 21, right after the expected beginning of a surge in site traffic from the 2022 World Cup. It seems Musk and his people only have the names of those staff who clicked the link, so they now have to figure out who has to be fired and locked out of their accounts, and they are extremely afraid of sabotage. Soon after all this happened, text-message based two-factor authentication broke again, causing DownDetector, where users can report site issues, to have a spike in reports for Twitter. This spike in reports, while lower, has not yet tailed off to normal.
The top item trending at Twitter itself is now #RIPTwitter, and users are fleeing in droves. People are trying to archive what they have, or at least what they want to save. Mastodon hit another all-time record for most new users in an hour. Paul Krugman is openly telling his Twitter followers about his Mastodon handle and telling them to follow him there. Artists are moving their Twitter stuff over to other sites, including old, almost forgotten places like Newgrounds and Tumblr, as fast as they can. While The Onion has yet to comment on these events, The Beaverton (Canadian Onion) has put out this short article, titled “New bird added to endangered species list.”
In the words of the extradimensional demon who must be behind all this (just kidding, it’s only Elon Musk’s own incompetent narcissism): “Welcome to Twitmageddon!”