Elon Musk fires Twitter employees overnight for criticising his plans on internal channels

With each passing day, it seems the relationship between Twitter employees and their new boss Elon Musk is growing strenuous. After firing nearly half of all Twitter employees and several thousands of other workers who were contractual moderators, Elon Musk is still on a firing spree, terminating everyone who does not see eye to eye with him and his methods. [caption id=“attachment_11638971” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Elon Musk fired over 20 engineers or so who were discussing and criticising his plans for Twitter on Twitter’s internal Slack channels. The fired employees were told that their “recent behaviours violated company policy.” Image Credit: AFP[/caption] Elon Musk recently fired a bunch of Twitter employees, mainly engineers who were criticising Musk’s plans for Twitter on the company’s internal slack channels. Like all previous terminations, this firing took place over email and was done overnight, with fired employees finding out about their terminations when they were unable to log into their work-issued laptops and work-related services. Taking to the micro-blogging website, several employees confirmed the layoff on their verified accounts. One employee even shared a screenshot of the mail he received from Twitter HR, stating that their “recent behaviours violated company policy."

Several other employees reported that they too received an email saying that they had violated Twitter’s policy, although no revision has been made to the policy manual ever since Musk took over. Twitter, for those who are unaware, had a corporate culture where employees were free to voice their opinions about the workings of the company on the internal channels, as long as they did it while maintaining the decorum of the channels. It is still not clear how many employees had been let go in the latest firing, however, as per NBC News, it is estimated that it could be as high as 20. Just recently, a senior engineer was fired from Twitter after he publicly called out Musk on Twitter for spreading misinformation about the inner workings of the platform and sending out a wrong message about Twitter’s functioning as an app. The “Chief Twit” had posted an apology for Twitter being “super slow” in several countries, saying that the app is doing “>1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render timelines”. However, Eric Frohnhoefer, a developer who said he has worked on Twitter for Android for years, responded to Mr Musk’s tweet by saying that his assessment was wrong. The tech billionaire then asked him what is the correct figure and what have the developers done to fix it. Soon reactions started pouring in. There were developers who supported Mr Frohnhoefer, others he should have informed his boss “privately”. But the developer responded, “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email." One user then tagged the new Twitter chief asking if he wants the person with “this kind of attitude” on your team. Mr Musk then responded to the same thread saying, “He’s fired”.