Early in November, Twitter’s roughly 7,500 workers acquired a terse electronic mail from a generic tackle: “In an effort to position Twitter on a wholesome path, we are going to undergo the troublesome strategy of lowering our international work drive.” The be aware was signed “Twitter.” On Nov. 3, some folks on the firm acquired emails indicating they might be laid off the following day.
That night time, Ms. Solomon, her husband and some colleagues headed to Dots Cafe Portland, a lounge on Clinton Road. Telephones had been on the desk, face up, she mentioned. Because the work mates talked, they tapped away at their telephones, collaborating in chats on the Sign app with colleagues in London, Seattle and San Francisco. Messages like “I received hit” had been flying throughout screens, Ms. Solomon recalled. “You had been seeing your co-workers drop like flies,” she mentioned.
By the following afternoon her crew of about 10 engineers was lowered to 4. Ms. Solomon and her husband had survived the spherical of layoffs. The following week, she recalled, she awaited additional route from Mr. Musk or the brand new government crew. Nothing got here, she mentioned, apart from an electronic mail alerting workers that distant work would now not be permitted, with few exceptions.
Many workers discovered of Mr. Musk’s priorities by watching his Twitter feed, the place he posted often about firm enterprise to his greater than 100 million followers. On Nov. 5, he complained concerning the platform’s search perform: “Search inside Twitter jogs my memory of Infoseek in ’98! That can even get quite a bit higher pronto,” he wrote. That very same day, he tweeted: “Twitter will quickly add means to connect long-form textual content to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots.”
That was greater than Ms. Solomon and lots of of her colleagues had heard internally. “Radio silence,” she mentioned. She started to vent her frustration on Twitter.
One among her first tweets on this vein got here on Nov. 6, shortly after Mr. Musk introduced a brand new rule for Twitter customers in a tweet: “Any identify change in any respect will trigger non permanent lack of verified checkmark,” he wrote. He had posted that message after many individuals on Twitter had modified their names to variations on Mr. Musk’s identify, most of them mocking.