“Twitter to start breaking down soon,” say employees after mass resignation, as core, ‘critical’ teams leave- Technology News, Firstpost

Mehul Reuben DasNov 18, 2022 12:49:44 IST

Current remaining and former employees of Twitter have come out and said that the platform may suffer from a catastrophic breakdown, as core engineering teams, HR and finance and a number of key personnel taking care of operations have decided to resign.

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum earlier this week, telling the people working at Twitter to either resign voluntarily or to brace themselves for a hardcore reset of the work culture at Twitter, that would involve longer working hours, unpaid overtime, and working through the weekends, as well as some public holidays.

Reports have suggested that most teams at Twitter have decided to put in their papers and resign voluntarily, instead of being a part of what Elon Musk is calling “Twitter 2.0.”

The people who decided to resign, or have already resigned, involve members from most of the core engineering and development teams at Twitter. A reporter from Insider has revealed that Twitter’s payroll team, financial reporting team and taxes team for the US, have completely resigned.

Sooo I’m told by two people that the entirety of Twitters payroll department has resigned/not elected to sign up for Elons Twitter 2.0

— Kali Hays (@HaysKali) November 18, 2022

With the payroll team gone, Twitter will have to hire contractors to step up and ensure that severance packages of the people who have left, as well as salaries of people still working at the company, are paid on time.

Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission, the Verge reported. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front-end teams that route engineering requests to the correct back-end services. The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.

Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.

The situation is so bad, that Reuters has reported that in case Twitter goes down, or suffers an outage, which, former and current employees say is imminent, there is no one left to fix things in many areas.

According to a report by The Verge, remaining and departing Twitter employees said that given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. 

????

“Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon.”

“It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here”

— Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) November 18, 2022

Another report claims that the internal version of the Twitter app used by employees is already slowing down, and that the main version of the app that is open to all, may break as soon as tonight.

???? Twitter could break as soon as tonight.

According to an inside source, the internal version of the Twitter app used by employees is already slowing down. pic.twitter.com/dIp2EODyQV

— Pop Base (@PopBase) November 18, 2022

Meanwhile, Twitter recruiters have already started reaching out to outside engineers to see if they want to join “Twitter 2.0 – an Elon company.”

Ironically, Twitter does not have a communications department as well, as people staffing that office have either been terminated or have left.