Nov 17 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Twitter workers are estimated to be leaving the beleaguered social media company after new owner Elon Musk issued an ultimatum for employees to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.
In a poll for the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer of “Opt out, I’m free! “
A quarter said they chose to stay “reluctantly” and only 7% of those polled said they were “clicking yes to stay, I’m a die-hard”.
Musk has been meeting with some top employees to try to convince them to stay, said a current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with colleagues on Twitter.
While it’s unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the numbers underscore the reluctance of some executives to remain at a company where Musk has rushed to lay off half its employees, including top management, and is relentlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and intense pace.
The company notified its employees that it will close its offices and cut off badge access until Monday, according to two sources.  Security officers began evicting employees from the office on Thursday afternoon, a source said.
Twitter, which has lost several members of its communications team, did not respond to a request for comment.
The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of workers.
On Thursday afternoon, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began to slow down, according to a source familiar with the matter, who estimated that the public version of Twitter was at risk of breaking overnight.
“If it breaks, there’s no one to fix things in many areas,” said the person, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation.
Reports of Twitter outages spiked from fewer than 50 to about 350 reports Thursday afternoon, according to the website Downdetector, which tracks website and app outages.
In a private conversation at Signal with about 50 Twitter employees, nearly 40 said they had decided to leave, according to the former employee.
And in a private Slack group for current and former Twitter employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary layoff,” said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.
A separate poll for Blind asked staff to estimate the percentage of people who would leave Twitter based on their perception.  More than half of respondents estimated that at least 50% of workers would leave.
Blue hearts and greeting emojis flooded Twitter and its internal chatrooms Thursday, for the second time in two weeks as Twitter employees said goodbye.
Until 6 p.m.  east, more than two dozen Twitter employees across the United States and Europe had announced their departures in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, although each resignation could not be independently verified.
Early Wednesday, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees, saying, “Going forward, to create an innovative Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely tough.”
The email asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stay.  Those who did not respond by 5 p.m. ET on Thursday would be considered resigned and given a severance package, the email said.
As the deadline loomed, workers scrambled to figure out what to do.
A team at Twitter has decided to take the leap together and leave the company, a departing employee told Reuters.
In an apparent call by Musk for employees to be “hardcore,” the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as “soft core engineers” or “former hard core engineers.”