A number of employees have resigned from Twitter’s Boston office, two weeks after a mass layoff and amid turmoil under new owner Elon Musk, according to social-media posts and a source familiar with the matter.
In a Slack messaging channel for the Boston office, at least nine people indicated that they were leaving, some posting the “saluting face” emoji that has come to symbolize workers departing the troubled social-media company. Musk had issued a Thursday evening deadline for Twitter employees to decide whether to stay or leave with three months of severance pay.
“I’m out of here too after 9¼ years,” one person wrote in a Slack message viewed by the Globe. “Will miss all the amazing Boston tweeps and the incredible new office!”
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Other workers filmed a video from what appeared to be the company’s Boston office, signaling their departure Thursday night.
It’s been a ride pic.twitter.com/0VDf5hn2UA
— Matt Miller (@brainiaq2000) November 17, 2022
“We’re all about to get fired,” said Matt Miller, as he and four of his co-workers apparently counted down the seconds until 5 p.m.
The source told the Globe that about 300 employees used to report to Twitter’s Boston office, a number that includes remote workers, before the mass layoff earlier this month. After the layoff, the number of people in the Boston office Slack channel dropped from about 300 people to just over 100.
On Friday, 107 people appeared in the Slack channel, but that number did not account for the people who resigned Thursday, as they had not been removed from company systems, the source said.
A large number of Twitter’s Boston employees work in engineering roles.
“It’s becoming a toxic place to work, people are not comfortable here,” the source said. “And engineers have so much job security that they can leave and find another job so quickly.”
In the Twitter video from Thursday, which showed a sign for “@TwitterBoston” in the background, Miller and his colleagues shared how long they worked for Twitter, with some saying they had been there for more than nine years. That would mean they were a part of Twitter when it first established a presence in the Boston area through two acquisitions.
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According to what appears to be Miller’s LinkedIn page, he worked for Cambridge-based television analytics company Bluefin Labs until 2013, when Twitter acquired the company and another local startup, mobile-app tool Crashlytics.
Miller and other local employees did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Twitter combined Bluefin and Crashlytics in an office at 141 Portland St. in Cambridge and in late 2019 leased a larger space in Boston at 2 Center Plaza.
Twitter, which employed 7,500 people before Musk took over, conducted a mass layoff in early November that affected about half of the firm’s workforce. The cut impacted at least 55 employees at the company’s Boston office, according to a letter from Twitter’s human resources department to the State Dislocated Worker Unit on Nov. 4.
It’s unclear how many employees left the company overall on Thursday, but The New York Times put the estimated figure at 1,200, citing anonymous sources.
Twitter told employees via e-mail that its office buildings would be closed until Monday. But on Friday, Musk reportedly summoned the company’s software engineers to San Francisco headquarters for an in-person meeting.
Anissa Gardizy can be reached at anissa.gardizy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @anissagardizy8 and on Instagram @anissagardizy.journalism.