Twitter has been devolving into chaos since Elon Musk took control of the social-media platform late last month, but the ultimate test of its ability to stay afloat with thousands fewer employees is about to begin and could rest on one tiny team.
Every four years, the World Cup leads to engagement spikes for Twitter, as soccer fans jump on the platform to see video highlights, react to the action and interact with one another. The quadrennial event begins Sunday, and any preparation that Twitter employees would normally make for the event have taken a back seat to confusion and disarray that has snowballed since Tesla Inc. TSLA, -1.63% Chief Executive Musk acquired the company and began making massive changes.
Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s more than 7,000 employees a week after closing his convoluted, on-and-off $ 44 billion acquisition, then continued to fire contractors as well as workers who voiced displeasure with his tactics publicly and on internal Slack discussions. The workers who remained even after those cuts would likely be enough to at least maintain the site during the coming event, but Musk’s actions in recent days have left most of the remaining employees standing on the sidelines and wondering if they still have a job and, even if they do, whether they should bother doing it, multiple Twitter employees said on condition of anonymity.
A series of emails Musk sent to Twitter employees this week, which MarketWatch has viewed, led many to believe they were no longer employed by the company.
- Around midnight Pacific time Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning, Musk sent an email to all Twitter employees with the subject line “A Fork in the Road” that said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore,” which “will mean working long hours at high intensity.” He asked those who wanted to be part of “Twitter 2.0” to click a link and agree, and wrote that anyone who did not do so by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday would receive three months of severance pay.
- According to Twitter employees, follow-up questions to legal and human-resources officials on Wednesday morning were not able to be answered because those employees had not been briefed on the plan. By late Wednesday evening, less than 24 hours before the deadline to decide, a document was distributed to employees with frequently asked questions about healthcare and other benefits beyond the severance Musk promised.
- As the deadline passed Thursday, many Twitter employees assumed they would no longer work for the company, and said goodbye to their colleagues publicly on the service as well as in the company’s Slack channels. Employees who spoke with MarketWatch estimated 75% to 80% of the employees they knew refused to voluntarily sign on to work for Musk’s Twitter, with some of those who stayed doing so because they were in the country on H-1B visas that require them to stay employed to remain in the U.S., or because they had medical needs, such as surgeries, already scheduled.
- On Thursday evening, after the deadline passed, Twitter told employees that the company offices would be closed until Monday. Employees who spoke with MarketWatch took that to mean that they would not be expected to work even if they had agreed to Musk’s conditions.
- On Friday, Musk amped up the confusion. In a mass email, he asked engineers who write software code to come into the San Francisco office — which, again, was supposed to be closed to workers — at 2 p.m. and to send him screenshots of their work from the past six months ahead of time. In follow-up emails, he said that those who could not physically make it to the office or had family emergencies could meet with him by video, but suggested that employees fly to San Francisco with no notice on the Friday before Thanksgiving to meet with him.
Confusion reigned for Twitter employees and users amid the contradictory statements and actions, even as their credentials continued to work into Friday afternoon, workers said. Of the 3,700 employees who remained after the first batch of layoffs, internal documents showed that roughly 1,200 had resigned, according to a New York Times report Friday, and it was uncertain if that counted the many employees who had simply refused to state whether they would stay or leave.
Many users took to the platform Thursday evening and into Friday to suggest that the demise of Twitter had arrived and the entire system would break down without the employees who had walked away assuming their time with Twitter was done. Workers who spoke to MarketWatch were not as concerned, at least for the next couple of days. They said that as long as Twitter is not trying to launch new features or make other massive changes, the platform should still function — as long as one team remained.
Opinion: Why Tesla investors are the biggest losers in Elon Musk’s Twitter deal
The team that will likely determine whether Twitter can survive the crush of usage expected when the World Cup kicks off is known as Twitter Command Center, or TCC, workers said. They are reportedly roughly 20 engineers tasked with keeping Twitter up and running no matter the crush of traffic or new capabilities being deployed, and the team was described in this manner in a 2016 blog post:
“Behind unmarked doors in office buildings across the globe, engineers sit in front of walls covered in 60-inch LCD panels displaying graphs of many colors. Fueled mostly by caffeine, candy, and a wary eye, these teams are tasked with a complex job: ensuring all the services supporting Twitter are available, responsive, and functioning as expected — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
“ Employees with whom MarketWatch spoke were uncertain how many TCC workers remained on staff and working, though at least one said he believed the team has “very few people remaining” and that “a majority of them have left.” ”
Employees with whom MarketWatch spoke were uncertain how many TCC workers remained on staff and working, though at least one said he believed the team has “very few people remaining” and that “a majority of them have left.” The TCC team’s Slack channel — usually all business, as it is where members of other teams rush with emergencies that only TCC can solve — was filled with the same “salute” and heart emojis Thursday used by Twitter workers to say goodbye to colleagues as other channels, a different employee said.
MarketWatch asked Musk on Twitter how many TCC employees remained and whether it would be enough to weather the coming World Cup storm, and did not receive a response. Twitter’s public-relations staff was let go in the first wave of mass layoffs conducted by Musk earlier this month; Musk dissolved Tesla’s public-relations department years ago, and an email to that company also went unanswered Friday.
See also: Elon Musk on the hook to pay more than $ 200 million to 3 fired Twitter execs
Tesla engineers have been accompanying Musk to Twitter headquarters since he acquired the company, and have been interviewing Twitter engineers about how to maintain the platform, workers told MarketWatch. But Twitter employees cautioned that the depth of knowledge about Twitter’s system needed to address the multiple potential problems that could arise would require much more than a few whiteboard sessions with those who have built and maintained the system for years, and that many of the employees who have left took years of institutional knowledge with them. TCC also relies on employees in other parts of the company to address a multitude of services that can break.
All of that adds up to complete uncertainty about whether Twitter will be able to continue reliably operating through the kickoff of the World Cup and beyond. And if even the next few days of operations are questionable, Musk’s plans for a “hardcore” new Twitter is even more of a mystery.
MarketWatch senior reporter Levi Sumagaysay contributed to this article.