SAN FRANCISCO – Employee departures multiplied at Twitter on Thursday after an ultimatum from new owner Elon Musk, who demanded staff choose between being “extremely hardcore” and working long hours, or losing their jobs.

“I may be #exceptional, but gosh darn it, I’m just not #hardcore,” tweeted one former employee, Ms Andrea Horst, whose LinkedIn profile still reads “Supply Chain & Capacity Management (Survivor) @Twitter”.

She added the hashtag “#lovewhereyouworked”, as did many other employees announcing their choice.

The departures highlight the reluctance of some of Twitter’s 3,000 or so employees to remain at a company where Mr Musk earlier fired half of the workforce, including top management, and is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasise long hours and an intense pace.

Mr Musk took to Twitter late on Thursday and said that he was not worried about resignations as “the best people are staying”.

Mr Musk met some top employees on Thursday to try to convince them to stay, said one current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with Twitter colleagues.

The company also notified employees that it will close its offices and cut badge access until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers began kicking some employees out of one office on Thursday evening, one source said.

The Straits Times understands that the Singapore office is closed.

Over 110 Twitter employees across at least four continents had announced their decision to leave in public Twitter posts reviewed by Reuters, though each resignation could not be independently verified. About 15 employees, many in ad sales, posted their intention to stay at the company.

In Twitter’s internal chat tool, over 500 employees wrote farewell messages on Thursday, a source familiar with the notes said.

A poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work e-mail addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, had showed 42 per cent of 180 respondents opting for “Taking exit option, I’m free!”

A quarter said they had chosen to stay “reluctantly”, and only 7 per cent of the poll participants said they “clicked yes to stay, I’m hardcore”.

In a private chat on Signal with about 50 Twitter staff, nearly 40 said they had decided to leave, according to the former employee.

And in a private Slack group for Twitter’s current and former employees, about 360 people joined a new channel titled “voluntary-layoff,” said a person with knowledge of the Slack group.

The exact number of employees intending to leave the company could not be immediately established.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

A separate poll on Blind asked staff to estimate what percentage of people would leave Twitter based on their perception. More than half of respondents estimated at least 50 per cent of employees would leave.

Early on Wednesday, Mr Musk had e-mailed Twitter 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 e-mail asked staff to click “yes” if they wanted to stick around. Those who did not respond by 5pm Eastern time on Thursday would be considered to have quit and given a severance package, the e-mail said.

As the deadline approached, employees scrambled to figure out what to do.

One team within Twitter decided to take the leap together and leave the company, one employee who is leaving told Reuters.

Blue hearts and salute emojis flooded Twitter and its internal chatrooms on Thursday, the second time in two weeks as Twitter employees said their goodbyes.

Notable departures included Ms Tess Rinearson, who was tasked with building a cryptocurrency team at Twitter. Ms Rinearson tweeted the blue heart and salute emojis.

In an apparent jab at Mr Musk’s call for employees to be “hardcore”, the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as “softcore engineers” or “ex-hardcore engineers”.

Much of the fevered talk driving engagement on Twitter late on Thursday was concerning the possibility of the site’s imminent demise.

Mr Musk noted the irony by posting the popular meme of an actor jokingly posing over a grave. Both the man and the tombstone were overlaid with Twitter’s logo. The post was “liked” by more than one million users.

In a later tweet, sent during Friday’s early hours on the West Coast, the billionaire said: “Record numbers of users are logging in to see if Twitter is dead, ironically making it more alive than ever!”

The departures include many engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages, raising questions about the stability of the platform amid the loss of employees.

On Thursday evening, the version of the Twitter app used by employees began slowing down, according to one source familiar with the matter, who estimated that the public version of Twitter was at risk of breaking down during the night.

Reports of Twitter outages rose sharply from fewer than 50 to about 350 reports on Thursday evening, according to website Downdetector, which tracks website and app outages.

As the resignations rolled in, Mr Musk cracked a joke on Twitter.

“How do you make a small fortune in social media?“ he tweeted. “Start out with a large one.”

AFP, REUTERS