The strikes happened a day after Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, rushed to offer new features to the popular messaging service after paying $44 billion to acquire it.
Musk issued a warning to workers on Thursday, saying the plant was riskily depleting its financial reserves and may eventually go bankrupt if nothing was done to stop it.
Lea Kissner, Twitter’s chief security officer, said, “I’ve made the hard choice to leave Twitter,” resigning allegedly alongside other significant privacy or security professionals.
Yoel Roth, the website’s head of trust and safety, abruptly resigned, according to US media, just one day after vehemently defending Musk’s content filtering policies to advertisers.
Robin Wheeler, who played a significant role in connecting Twitter with advertisers and was seen as a major Musk supporter within the firm, was also fired.
The uproar followed the launch of the much-anticipated Twitter Blue subscription service, which lets users pay $7.99 a month for a coveted blue tick and a second grey “official” badge for some high-profile accounts.
The introduction of the payment service, which is now only accessible on the smartphone app for iPhones and in the United States, was overshadowed on Wednesday when Musk abruptly canceled the new grey label.
The introduction also saw the formation of a flurry of bogus accounts as users took advantage of the possibility to mimic politicians and celebrities like NBA star Lebron James or former British prime minister Tony Blair.
The upheaval prompted an unusual warning from the Federal Trade Commission, a US agency that regulates consumer safety. Twitter has been under surveillance for previous security and privacy breaches.
An FTC spokeswoman issued a statement saying, “We are watching recent events at Twitter with significant concern.”
The spokesperson continued, referencing Twitter’s prior agreements to abide by US privacy laws, “No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees.”
Twitter could incur millions of dollars in fines for disobeying FTC orders.
Ten days after purchasing the business and taking sole ownership of it, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX sacked half of the 7,500 workers at the California-based company.
According to employee text exchanges reviewed by AFP, Musk addressed his surviving staff on Thursday for the first time since the layoffs and asked them to help the website attract one billion users.
Musk also cautioned that the firm was losing money and voiced concern about the impact of the struggling economy on his recently acquired company.
“You might have seen that I sold a lot of Tesla shares. I did it to keep Twitter alive,” he is quoted as saying.
The decision of advertisers to avoid Twitter due to their concerns over Musk’s plans has also crippled the social media platform.
Work-from-home practices at Twitter, which were common at the San Francisco-based firm, were being ended, the billionaire revealed.
