After an ultimatum announced by new Twitter owner Elon Musk to commit to extreme hard work or be fired, the employee exodus at the short message service has continued. "I may be exceptional, but damn I'm just not hardcore," Twitter employee Andrea Horst wrote Thursday, referring to Musk's announcement that the company had to be "extremely hardcore" to compete.

Musk wrote in a memo to his employees on Wednesday that employees should be prepared for "long, high-intensity work days": "Only exceptional performance is considered sufficient." He gave the employees a deadline of Thursday afternoon (local time) to submit a corresponding commitment to work online. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired with three months' salary as severance pay.

Words failed her to express how grateful she is for having "the job of my dreams" on Twitter, another outgoing executive, Deanna Hines-Glasgow, wrote on Thursday. "It's been a wild ride."

According to industry journalist Zoe Schiffer, Twitter management told employees the offices were temporarily closed on Thursday and could not be accessed even with an electronic door opener. Musk took over Twitter at the end of October for 44 billion dollars (around 43 billion euros) and immediately fired the top floor. A week later, he fired around half of the 7,500 employees.

Musk's restructuring of the short message service is extremely chaotic. It was only on Tuesday that the richest person in the world postponed the new subscription model with the blue verification symbol until the end of November. He was reacting to a flood of fake profiles on Twitter. Several major corporations have suspended advertising on the network over concerns about Twitter's development.