Twitter employees resign en masse in response to Musk's latest request

Earlier this week, Elon Musk gave the employees of Twitter only 36 hours to decide whether or not they wanted to stay for what he is calling "Twitter 2.0," a new version of the website that would ask its staff to be "extremely hard core" when it comes to its success. Since then, the New York Times and others are reporting that "hundreds" of people are resigning from Twitter and that there are significant concerns over the longevity of the social media site.

The billionaire's buyout of Twitter was complete in October, and the changes have been momentous. He's brought $13 billion of debt into Twitter, delisted its stock and made it into a private company, fired nearly 4,000 staff across departments like advertising, content moderation and engineering, fired people who were poking fun at him, and introduced Twitter Blue. The new verification feature was instantaneously used for trolling where people were pretending to be high-profile public figures and brands and posting controversial opinions or memes under this guise. “If scammers want to do this a million times, that’s just a whole bunch of free money,” said Musk of the rise of impersonators on the platform.

Not only are users getting sick of Musk and his team's erratic strategies for Twitter, the large majority of employees seem to be in a similar mood. On Wednesday, he told his workforce that they had until the end of the day on Thursday to decide whether or not they wanted to stay at the company, using a Google form. Those who chose to leave would receive two months on payroll with benefits and one month of severance pay if they sign a forthcoming separation agreement - the terms of this agreement would be explained "in the coming weeks."

In what appeared to be another thinly veiled attempt to gut the website's staff count to compensate for that aforementioned debt, the company saw seeing hundreds of people hang up their hats. The Verge states that a number of "critical" teams are "completely or near-completely" gone and anonymous sources imagine that the platform will soon start to crumble.

"It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving," said one. "It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be."