According to current and former employees as well as message board messages shared, panic and dread rippled throughout Twitter Inc. offices on Thursday as 7,500 employees from San Francisco to Singapore worried for job losses that were intended to strike about half of the staff.
Elon Musk, a billionaire, took over last week but has kept the staff in the dark. According to several employees, he has not spoken to the team or revealed his plans for the company’s future, leaving workers to sift through message boards, news articles, and tweets by Musk and his advisers in search of hints about their future.
One senior Twitter employee claimed that managers had been barred from holding team meetings or speaking with employees directly and added that they were being watched.They remarked, “It feels like we’re working with the Gestapo.”Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For fear of retaliation from new managers, employees have mostly stopped posting on internal Slack channels. Instead, many have turned to encrypted messaging applications and the dedicated Twitter company channel on the app Blind, which gives employees a place to exchange information anonymously.
A Twitter employee posted “I’m really frightened tweeps” on Blind on Thursday. Blind validates employees using their work email addresses. Coworkers on Twitter frequently address one another as “tweeps.”