The general manager of Twitter France slams the door

The departures are linked without weakening at Twitter. After a first wave of brutal and massive layoffs, which saw nearly half of the platform’s employees fired (3,700 people), the survivors of this bloodletting are wondering about their future. In recent days, departures have accelerated after an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter having asked employees still in place to choose between giving up “thoroughly, unconditionally”or leave.

The reflection has obviously made its way into the mind of Damien Viel, the general manager of Twitter France, who announced his departure in a tweet posted this Sunday, November 20. “It’s over. Pride, honor and mission accomplished. Goodbye Twitter France”, he wrote. Damien Viel has been at the head of the French branch of the social network since 2015. Previously, he served as YouTube’s sales director for Southern Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

A month in hell

Since the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk materialized at the end of October, the social network has been swimming in chaos. Because if the decisions of the boss of Tesla have had disastrous human consequences, thousands of employees having been dismissed unceremoniously overnight, they could also have technical fallout likely to threaten the viability of the platform. In the absence of sufficient staff to operate it, the microblogging site could indeed face outages during events generating high traffic, such as the FIFA World Cup which has just started in Qatar.

Upon his arrival at the helm of Twitter, Elon Musk had ordered employees to achieve up to $ 1 billion in annual savings on infrastructure costs. Dubbed the Deep Cuts Plan, the project aims to save between $1.5 million and $3 million per day, including on server and cloud service expenses. In addition to technical failures, Twitter could also encounter major problems in moderating violent and hateful content. And this while Donald Trump’s Twitter account has just been restored.