On Monday night, one such worker, Haraldur Thorleifsson, a distinguished designer on the firm, took to Twitter to complain that the corporate had but to substantiate that he’d been laid off, 9 days after he was locked out of his work laptop.
Twitter’s CEO responded by asking Haraldur what he did at Twitter. Musk even tweeted that he would approve Haraldur breaching confidentiality to share what he did.
However after Haraldur shared a few of his obligations at Twitter, Musk responded with a clip from the film “Workplace Area,” the place two consultants problem an worker with a query: “What would you say you do right here?”
On Feb. 26, Haraldur was reported to be one of many 200 workers laid off by the social media firm in late February. Haraldur, who joined Twitter in 2021, even posted a goodbye tweet the identical day.
But, based on his tweets, Haraldur by no means received official affirmation that he was “not employed” on the firm till after his Twitter dialog with Musk.
Twitter didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. The social media firm not has a communications division.
Acqui-hire
Haraldur joined Twitter in 2021 after promoting his design company Ueno to the social media firm. The sale was introduced as an “acqui-hire,” or when an organization is purchased for its expertise, quite than different elements of its enterprise operations.
In keeping with Haraldur’s private web site, he led an “innovation staff” at Twitter that helped to spearhead Twitter Communities in addition to the service’s “edit button.”
Now, about that edit button @jack
— Halli (@iamharaldur) January 6, 2021
Haraldur provided extra particulars of his work in his dialog with Musk on Monday, which included shifting “the corporate away from specializing in energy customers and on to youthful customers (as a result of our person base is getting older).”
Musk responded by casting doubt on Haraldur’s work, tweeting: “Pics or it didn’t occur.”
Twitter layoffs
Different Twitter acquisitions have fared poorly after Musk purchased the corporate. Twitter laid off Martijn de Kuijper, the founding father of Revue, a publication service that Twitter acquired in 2021, as a part of its job cuts on Feb. 26.
“Appears to be like like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is basically over,” de Kujiper tweeted. Twitter shut down Revue final yr.
Each Haraldur and de Kujiper had been on a “don’t hearth” checklist, as a result of bills of laying them off, reported Platformer, a publication run by know-how journalists Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton. (On Monday, Haraldur requested on Twitter whether or not the corporate “can pay me what they owe me per my contract.”)
Continuous layoffs could also be taking a toll on Twitter, which has skilled frequent glitches in latest weeks.
On Monday, Twitter suffered one other outage, as customers complained that they had been unable to share photos or entry hyperlinks. Platformer reported that the outage was as a consequence of Twitter shutting down free entry to the corporate’s API.
Platformer stories that only one web site reliability engineer was placed on the venture, who made a “unhealthy configuration change” that broke each Twitter’s platform and lots of of its inner instruments, citing a present worker on the firm.
“A small API change had huge ramifications. The code stack is extraordinarily brittle for no good causes,” Musk tweeted on Monday. “Will finally want an entire rewrite.”
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