Twitter employees have allegedly refused to accept new boss Elon Musk's "ultimatum" to commit to a "hardcore" work environment with hundreds of workers reportedly having resigned on Thursday. Musk had given Thursday 5pm ET as the deadline for workers to signup for the new mandate or resign.
Twitter has now ordered to keep its office shuttered till Monday. Workers were told that the offices would reopen on November 21, the BBC reported.
Here is all you need to know about the latest chaos at Twitter and how it unfolded:
What happened?
In the runup to the Thursday deadline, several employees floated their resignation, CNBC reported. Multiple technology reporters familiar with the development took to Twitter and confirmed the reports of mass resignations.
Journalist Alex Heath also wrote that the company's internal chat groups were being flooded with "salute" emojis signaling that they "decided to not stay for Musk's "Twitter 2.0" cultural reset."
Amid all this, Twitter issued a memo informing the workers that the office building will be closed till November 21 without giving a reason.
The memo, accessed by BBC, Bloomberg and AFP, said that all badge access was being suspended temporarily. "Thank you for your flexibility. Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere," the memo said.
The flareup at the Twitter office happened after Musk on Wednesday morning reportedly issued an ultimatum to employees asking them to commit to a new "hardcore" work environment or call it a quit.
According to a report in The Washington Post, Musk told the employees in an e-mail that Twitter was shifting to an engineer-driven operation, one that will need to be extremely hardcore going forward. The report said that the employees were asked to click an icon and respond by Thursday if they agreed to comply with the new mandate and stay.
CNBC reported that Musk followed up this communication with two more emails directing the workers to hold in-person meetings at least once a month and that the managers could be fired for allowing employees to work remotely.
"Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution. It is also expected that you have in-person meetings with your colleagues on a reasonable cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month," CNBC quoted Musk's emails.
The employees were apparently disarrayed with the new directive of Musk, who took over the social media giant last month after finalising $44billion deal. Earlier, the new Twitter boss fired almost half of Twitter's full-time workers. CNBC reported that engineers and other workers started posting "goodbye messages" in the internal chat groups just ahead of the 5pm deadline on Thursday.
As the news of Twitter's mass resignations broke, 'RIP Twitter' and 'Goodbye Twitter' started trending on the microblogging website with people posting memes on the fiasco.
How Musk reacted
Amid the latest controversy, Musk has been on Twitter sharing memes and making cryptic comments. In the latest post, he shared a meme that said "Help us Ligma Johnson". Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson were pranksters who posed as fired Twitter employees outside the Twitter headquarters. Musk had later posed with them saying firing them was one of his "biggest mistakes". As Twitter saw another day of chaos, Musk tweeted memes calling out to the pranksters as a reaction.
Earlier, he shared a meme as 'RIP Twitter' trended.
He also posted a series of cryptic tweets where he said that Twitter had logged its highest usage.
"Let that sink in …," he wrote in another tweet. He had posted a similar tweet days before acquiring Twitter last month when he entered the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink.
"How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one," he said in another cryptic tweet.
Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson were pranksters who posed as fired Twitter employees outside the Twitter headquarters. The error is regretted.