Twitter employees lose access to Slack while Musk slacks off on paying the bills

Elon Musk continues to tighten Twitter’s wallet, prompting the company to shut down popular business chat tool Slack.

Confused Twitter employees were abruptly disconnected from their internal chats this week, Platformer reported.

On Wednesday, Twitter employees were told that Slack was unavailable due to “routine maintenance,” but CEO Elon Musk appeared to simply refuse to pay the bills.

“There is no regular maintenance. This is Bull****,” a Slack employee told Platformer.

Can’t chat or send code, “most engineers took a day off.”

It looks like Musk is going to cut costs and see 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 communications.

However, the Twitter employees (or what’s left of them) are not happy about the loss of their main communication platform without notice.

Some turned to the anonymous workplace app Blind to complain.

“We haven’t paid our Slack bill,” one employee wrote. Now almost everyone barely works. Frugal on a small scale and yet wasteful.’

For some, the move seems like the last straw in motivating them to leave the company.

“Weirdly, it was disabling Slack that prompted me to finally sign up to get out,” the contributor wrote.

For Twitter employees, losing Slack means losing access to important chat histories and documents they’ve relied on since Musk laid off thousands of employees.

“After everyone left, I had no one to ask questions when I was stuck,” one Twitter contributor wrote on Blind.

“I used to look for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”

Twitter employees also couldn’t use the company’s Jira progress tracker to track everything from feature update progress to regulatory compliance.

While Jira recovered on Thursday, Slack lay still. Some employees communicated via email, others took an extra day off.

It’s not the first time Twitter has been accused of failing to pay the bills. In January, the company was sued for failing to pay £115,000 in rent for its San Francisco offices.

Meanwhile, Musk is doing everything he can to raise money, including auctioning off hundreds of office supplies from Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

Twitter is actively promoting its Twitter Blue subscription, which comes with a blue tick for £8.40 per month.

In November, Musk warned that Twitter could go out of business if it didn’t grow subscription revenue to offset declining ad revenue.

Twitter no longer has a communications department.