Elon Musk is further tightening Twitter’s purse strings, resulting in the company discontinuing popular corporate chat tool, Slack.
Confused Twitter employees found themselves abruptly cut off from their internal chats this week, as reported by Platformer.
On Wednesday, Twitter employees were told that Slack was down for ‘routine maintenance’ but it turns out CEO Elon Musk might have just refused to pay the bills.
‘There is no such thing as routine maintenance. That’s bull****,’ a Slack employee told Platformer.
With no way to chat and no code to ship, ‘most engineers took the day off’.
It looks like Musk is trimming down costs and seeing if Twitter can run without paying for Slack.
At Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, employees use a Slack competitor called Mattermost, Microsoft Outlook and Teams for internal communication.
However, Twitter employees (or what’s left of them) are not pleased about losing their main communication platform without notice.
Some took to anonymous workplace app, Blind, to complain.
‘We didn’t pay our Slack bill,’ wrote one employee. ‘Now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.’
For some, the move seems to be the last straw to motivate them to leave the company.
‘Oddly enough, it’s the Slack deactivation that has pushed me to finally start applying to get out,’ wrote the employee.
For Twitter staff, losing Slack means losing access to important chat history and documents they’ve come to rely on since Musk laid off thousands of employees.
‘After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck,’ wrote a Twitter employee on Blind.
‘I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.’
Twitter staff also found themselves unable to use progress tracker tool, Jira, used by the company to track everything from progress on feature updates to regulatory compliance.
While Jira was restored on Thursday, Slack remained down. Some employees communicated over email, others took another day off.
This is not the first time Twitter been accused of failing to pay the bills. In January, the company was sued for not paying £115,000 in rent on San Francisco offices.
Meanwhile, Musk is doing everything possible to raise money including auctioning off hundreds of office items from Twitter’s San Francisco HQ.
Twitter is actively pushing its paid subscription, Twitter Blue, which comes with a blue check mark for £8.40 a month.
In November, Musk warned of a potential Twitter bankruptcy if it fails to boost subscription revenue to offset falling advertising income.
Twitter has not yet commented on the matter.
MORE : Twitter users report ‘disappearing’ replies and ‘broken’ timelines
MORE : Elon Musk tries to force feed his tweets to Twitter users
