Twitter on Fight or Flight Mode

Twitter has been all over the news lately and for all the wrong reasons. In the latest is a mass exodus that has led people to believe it will soon go under. Only a few days ago, there were reports of Musk sending an email to all staff highlighting that the “Twitter 2.0 will need to be extremely hardcore”, requiring employees to put in long hours and high intensity. The choices were simple – agree or get a three-month severance.   

On top of that, the latest information also suggests that all of the office buildings are temporarily closed, and the employees’ badge accesses have been revoked to prevent the  passing on of confidential information in public, or on social media platforms. 

A lot has transpired since Musk took Twitter’s reins and announced that there will be mass layoffs on the platform. Laid off employees either received intimation about their job status in unusual hours, or were just logged out of their slack channels all of a sudden. Contract employees numbering about 5,500 (80%) were also laid off, and in multiple cases employees were fired for criticising Musk on their private slack channels. 

Read: This is the End of Twitter As We Know It 

The cuts are said to have a significant impact on content moderation, and the core infrastructure that keeps the site running. Following is a chart from Downdetector depicting the outages Twitter had only in the last 24 hours. 

In response to speculations that Twitter may soon be dead, Musk says that his best people are staying, so he is not worried about those leaving. In a tweet dated only a few hours ago, Musk also added that Twitter has achieved an all-time high in terms of usage. 

The Rise of Koo 

Amidst all this, the Indian social media platform Koo has said that it will be expanding its reach to countries like USA, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Philippines, Middle-East and Africa, in an attempt to leverage on Twitter’s tumultuous run, selling Koo as an “alternative to Twitter” in the international market. 

Koo recently achieved a record high of 50 million downloads, and the numbers continue to grow. And, with the uncertainties growing around Twitter, many are planning to create a Koo account, as the hashtag #SwitchtoKooApp trends.