The loyalty oath by Elon Musk causes a wave of resignation and Twitter offices close

The tech giant with a previously good track record struggles to keep workers from leaving after Elon Musk gives his new employees an ultimatum to sign a pledge promising to work "long hours at high intensity.” Today (18^th Friday) the Twitter saga reached a new height when hundreds of workers refused to comply with the ultimatum in return for keeping their jobs. The company temporarily closed its offices to the staff.

Twitter users have already begun saying goodbye to the app, directing their followers to accounts on other social media platforms. Some hashtags that were trending on Twitter today were #RIPTwitter, #TwitterDown, Mastodon, and Myspace. Following Musk’s ultimatum to agree to work “long hours at high intensity,” or leave, hundreds of remaining employees at Twitter are said to have opted to resign.

The stability of the once-popular social media platform is in question, considering that the employees who decided to leave consist of many engineers in-charge of bug fixes and prevention of service outages. There is a discussion amongst Twitter management on which employees must be asked to return to work.

We can speculate that Musk had an idea of the substantial number of employees who would refuse to sign the pledge, seeing as he eased off on the return-to-office mandate last week. Musk is said to have told the workers that they can continue to work off-site as long as their superiors said that they make “an excellent contribution.”

According to a New York Times report today, Twitter announced via email saying they would close their office building and disable access for employee badges till Monday. There is much speculation online that the platform would go down in a matter of hours or days. The Twitter version used by employees began slowing down on Thursday evening. Website DownDetector says that there’s a significant rise in the number of user reports of issues with Twitter.

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one among many users who tweeted about where followers can connect with her in case of a breakdown of the app. Her follow-up tweet included, “Shout out to all the workers at Twitter…” Official US government accounts also provided followers with means of contacting them via other platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and their websites.

However, new CEO Musk seemed to be mocking the speculations about the downfall of Twitter, throughout the entire drama. According to Musk, Twitter usage was at an “all-time high.” According to sources on Twitter, Elon Musk met with quite a few top employees to convince them to stay with the company.

An email has been sent to employees saying, “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.” The email requested workers to click “Yes” if they desired to remain with Twitter. If there was no response by 5 pm eastern time on Thursday, those employees would be considered to have resigned and be given a severance package, according to the email.