Amid #RIPTwitter, Musk Boasts All-Time Excessive in Twitter Utilization: ‘lol’

Is Elon Musk fiddling whereas Twitter burns?

On Thursday, a whole bunch of Twitter workers stop the corporate, per the New York Occasions. The mass resignation got here after Musk, the mega-billionaire new proprietor of Twitter, demanded that staffers conform to an “extraordinarily hardcore” work tradition, which means “working lengthy hours at excessive depth” — or take three months severance pay. He had set a 5 p.m. ET deadline Thursday for Twitter staff to resolve whether or not they had been staying or going. The ultimatum got here after he pink-slipped half of the corporate’s 7,500-person workforce two weeks in the past.

Per a number of studies, Twitter’s remaining workers had been knowledgeable Thursday that the corporate was disabling worker badge entry to its workplaces till Monday, Nov. 21. Complete groups have disappeared, together with the engineering group that maintains Twitter’s “core system libraries that each engineer on the firm makes use of,” the Verge reported, quoting an nameless ex-employee who mentioned, “You can not run Twitter with out this crew.”

Amid the chaos at Twitter, customers have grown involved that the top is nigh for the social community. On Thursday night, the hashtag #RIPTwitter was the No. 1 trending matter within the U.S. (whereas No. 2 was “Elon,” adopted by “Tumblr” and “Mastodon,” a cool Twitter-like service that many self-imposed Twitter exiles have flocked to).

Is Musk distressed that his expensive $44 billion buy could also be in an irreversible meltdown? On his personal Twitter account, he was all sang-froid, jokes and memes.

“And … we simply hit one other all-time excessive in Twitter utilization lol,” the tech mogul tweeted late Thursday. Earlier, Musk had tweeted, “The very best individuals are staying, so I’m not tremendous frightened.”

For now, there don’t seem like critical exterior indicators that Twitter is in imminent hazard of shutting down. As of this writing, the Twitter API Standing web page indicated “all programs operational” and third-party uptime-monitoring service Downdetector confirmed a comparatively minor variety of error studies from customers.

No less than one Silicon Valley veteran believes the fears that Twitter will go belly-up over the key worker exodus are overblown. Invoice Gurley, normal companion at venture-capital agency Benchmark (and an early investor in Twitter), wrote on Twitter, “One of many causes firms routinely do 3 layoffs as an alternative of 1 is they’re nearly all afraid to ‘minimize an excessive amount of.’ They worry ‘hitting bone.’ However they VASTLY underestimate how resilient firms really are. Firms endure.”

Gurley continued, “That is additionally why everybody rooting for Twitter to ‘functionally fail’ are going to be disillusioned. The corporate had 1,000 workers in 2012 and had 200 [million monthly active users]. And the programs are method higher now. In the event that they return to that depend they’ll survive. You might be NOT seeing the ‘fail whale.’”

Musk replied to Gurley’s feedback by writing, “Don’t wanna jinx it, however there’s an opportunity we will hold Twitter alive” — together with a meme from “Dumb and Dumber”: