In the absence of good information, people will assume the worst.
That old communications mantra felt particularly apropos Thursday night, as Twitter users collectively melted down over the possible demise of the platform.
The furor stemmed from the latest destabilizing move by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, who gave employees 39 hours to decide whether they’re willing to work “long hours at high intensity” under his “extremely hardcore” management style. When the deadline passed at 5 p.m. Thursday, hundreds of Twitter staffers said sayonara to their new overlord, joining the other half of the company’s workforce that Musk laid off earlier this month.
Musk, as he’s wont to do, has said little of consequence about the impact of the departures. He’s gutted Twitter’s communications and public relations staff, adopting the same approach he uses at Tesla.
As a result, there are sizable gaps in knowledge about Twitter’s operations, many of which are being filled with anonymously sourced news reports.
The number of employees working to keep Twitter afloat following Thursday’s deadline is unknown. Fortune's Kylie Robison, citing a source at Twitter, reported that preliminary data suggested about 1,000 to 1,200 workers didn't agree to Musk's terms, effectively signing their resignation papers. The Washington Post reported that some staffers ballparked the number of remaining employees at 2,000 to 2,500, or roughly one-third of the 7,500-plus people employed at Twitter prior to Musk’s arrival, but the estimate was hardly official. Other news outlets merely said hundreds of employees jumped ship, offering no hard numbers.
The current state of Twitter’s engineering infrastructure remains uncertain. Current and former employees anonymously told news outlets that key departments were wiped out by resignations and layoffs, leaving critical operations at risk of collapse. However, the short- and long-term effect of those departures isn’t completely clear.
It’s unclear how many people are moderating content on Twitter, ensuring that hateful, graphic, and abusive posts are taken down in a timely manner. News reports suggest those units were devastated by layoffs and the elimination of thousands of contract positions, but there’s no concrete data to show whether offensive content is proliferating.
Without more clarity on these fronts, the Twitter community held a preemptive wake for the platform. Hashtags like #RIPTwitter and #TwitterShutdown trended. Users shared their favorite memories of the site. Elon antagonists railed against his proprietorship.
Yet here is what we do know.
Twitter needed an overhaul. The company had lost $1.3 billion over the past two years (in part due to the pandemic) after posting profits of $2.7 billion in two years before that. User growth had stagnated. Visually-driven apps like TikTok and Instagram were eating its lunch. And management had become stale.
Musk’s overhaul didn’t need to be this slapdash. Musk and his team could have adhered to basic tenets of communications, human relations, and common decency while executing a swift but orderly reorganization of the company.
Twitter appeared to function normally into Friday morning, without any major outages, bugs, or security lapses—though that’s no guarantee of future stability. In fact, current and former engineers said an accumulation of issues over time, rather than an acute crisis, would more likely befall the site.
And finally, Twitter users will give Musk every chance to keep the platform alive. Despite all the grumbling and grousing, Twitter’s 240 million-plus daily active users aren’t migrating en masse to Mastodon (it’s only added about 1 million users since Musk’s takeover) or flocking back to Facebook. Musk, if he’s to be believed, tweeted late Thursday that “we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage.”
Will Twitter ultimately flame out or flourish? Twitter devotees are understandably assuming the worst. But without better information about its current state of affairs, reports of its death are—for now—still exaggerated.
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Jacob Carpenter
