Twitter's Struggles Continue: More Layoffs and Unhappy Employees
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Hi, and welcome to the latest episode of the Elon Musk podcast. Today, we're going to be discussing a recent outage at Twitter that left employees without access to one of their most important communication tools, Slack. And what started as routine maintenance turned out to be a deliberate shutdown, leaving engineers with no way to chat and no way to ship their code. Now, resulting in most of them taking the day off.

And as we'll explore in this episode, Slack is not just a messaging app, but it's also a critical repository for important conversations, code snippets, and other data for the employees to complete their tasks. It's become so important to daily work that without it, employees may struggle to find the information that they need, leading to potential delays and setbacks.

Now join us as we delve into the Twitter Slack outage and the impact it had on the employees and the importance of communication tools like Slack in the modern workforce. Twitter Slack instance was down for routine maintenance on Wednesday.

and engineering teams took the day off due to no way to chat or ship code. Additionally, Jira, a tool used by Twitter to track everything from feature updates to regulatory compliance, also stopped working. Jira access has been restored on Thursday, but

But Platformer confirms that Slack wasn't down for routine maintenance, and a current Slack employee said there is no sure thing as routine maintenance. That's BS. It appears that Twitter hasn't paid its Slack bill, and that someone at Twitter manually shut off access.

This move suggests that Musk may have turned against the communication app or at least wants to see if Twitter can run without Slack and the expenses associated with it. Now on Blind, the anonymous workplace chat app, the disappearance of critical tools was met with a mixture of disbelief

frustration and glee. And for Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues. It's a store of institutional memory preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over. Now, Slack remained down at the company on Thursday, and while some employees communicated over email, others essentially took a second day off.

There's never a good time for a company to lose its primary communication infrastructure, but the loss of Slack is likely to be particularly stressful for employees working on Musk's latest big idea, open sourcing the algorithm that ranks tweets in the timeline. And on Monday, Musk announced that Twitter plans to open source his algorithm next week, but it remains to be seen how the loss of Slack will affect this project.

Now, as Twitter moves forward, it will be interesting to see if the company decides to switch to a different communication platform or if it will continue to rely on Slack. Regardless of the outcome, the recent outage highlights the importance of having a backup communication plan in place in case of emergencies. And Twitter employees were left without their primary communication infrastructure on Wednesday, June

when Slack went down for routine maintenance, of course. And there's no such thing, according to employees over at Slack and people at Twitter. Now, they may be cutting costs here. CEO may have been swapping out tools from Slack to another tool used by Tesla engineers. It's called Mattermost, and they also use Microsoft Teams.

Now, losing Slack altogether would be a significant blow to Twitter employees because they use this to gather data and code snippets and other things in the chats that they use with other workers. Now, one of these workers said that Slack was...

where they found their solutions 99% of the time. And the potential loss of Slack could also mark the end of an era where employee input was highly valued at Twitter, as employees have reportedly felt less comfortable sharing insights and opinions under Elon Musk's leadership.

And while concerns have been raised about the stability of Twitter following recent outages, a rare endorsement of Twitter stability from ad agency WPP has some advertisers reconsidering the benefits of doing business with the platform. WPP CEO Mark Reed stated that Twitter seems to be a lot more stable the last few months than perhaps it was toward the end of last year.

which led clients to consider how they can come back to Twitter. This represents a significant reversal for WPP, which urged advertisers to leave the platform last November. Meanwhile, Musk is testing other internal communications tools while he works to support Twitter through rapid updates to support new features in its transition to making its algorithm open source, which is set to happen next week.

Now, some employees have used email. Some employees have just taken the time off. But we're going to see next week when they implement these new communication tools, if they move the data from Slack to these new communication tools or into a repository so the users of the old Slack can get the data and the code in the conversations that they used during their workdays.

We'll be taking a quick break. So stay tuned and we'll be right back. Now, attention, Elon Musk fans. Get your exclusive Elon merchandise now at StarshipShirts.com. They've got everything from Tesla to SpaceX and even Twitter. And for our listeners, everything is currently only $16.99. That's right. Exclusive designs at unbeatable prices.

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Twitter has also recently announced a round of layoffs that has left some employees surprised and uncertain about their future at the company. The social media giant has been struggling with plummeting revenue and cost-cutting measures under the leadership of CEO Elon Musk, leading to significant changes in its workforce and operations. Now, let's take a closer look at what's been happening at Twitter. Now,

Twitter has conducted an unexpected round of layoffs over the weekend, and it struggles with the plunging revenue and aggressive cost-cutting measures under Elon. And according to a report by The Information, the company let go of at least 50 employees across various departments.

including engineers who help keep the social media network running. Now, layoffs also included hardcore Musk loyalists, said Zoe Schiffer, a journalist who covers the company closely for Platformer. She added that the layoffs included a ton of surprises. For instance, she tweeted, among the laid off was Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter Payments. In early November, Crawford tweeted, when your team is pushing around the clock to make deadlines, sometimes you sleep where you work.

The news of this layoff, although unexpected, is not surprising, giving Musk's cost-cutting measures since taking over the company in October last year. And since then, Twitter's headcount has fallen by over 70%. And its chief source of revenue, advertising, has fallen significantly.

The company has seen some technical glitches amid the turmoil, and on February 8th, Twitter users across North America were unable to send messages, with an error message saying they were over the daily limit for sending tweets. Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed, the company tweeted.

Now, Musk attempted to generate revenue in other ways besides advertising. But so far, those efforts have done little to improve the company's financial position. Among those efforts have been Twitter Blue, which is a monthly subscription service that includes a blue verification checkmark. And that service got off to a rocky start when trolls used it to impersonate brands and celebrities.

According to the information, by the middle of last month, only about 180,000 users had signed up for the service.

Many advertisers have been wary of where Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, would take the platform. That didn't stop Musk from wading into various touchy topics this weekend amid these layoffs. Musk came to the defense of Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert, after newspapers across the country canceled the comic strip for comments that called racist, hateful, and discriminatory.

Adams had described people who were black as members of a hate group from which white people should get away. Musk tweeted, for a very long time, U.S. media was racist against non-white people.

Now they're racist against whites and Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges and high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist. Now, Musk also this weekend applauded a Saturday Night Live opening monologue by Woody Harrelson touching on COVID vaccines and the pandemic. The actor talked about one of the craziest scripts he's read.

He said,

And then Musk tweeted, so based, nice work, NBCSNL. And then one Twitter wrote, go get ready for the meltdowns. Maybe the media outlets don't recognize that their propaganda is wrong.

Thank you for tuning into the Elon Musk podcast brought to you by Stage Zero Productions and hosted by me, Will Walden. We hope you've enjoyed today's episode and gained some valuable insights. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. And for exclusive ad-free content, check out our Patreon at patreon.com slash stage zero. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.