Twitter CEO Elon Musk gave employees an ultimatum - get hardcore, or leave. Turns out hundreds took the latter option with Twitter outages predicted.

The news comes as new Twitter owner Elon Musk told employees that emailed all employees and told them to either agree to help build Twitter 2.0 and sign on for an "extremely hardcore" experience or leave. Those wanting to stay could complete a Google Form to say so. Everyone else would effectively be handing their notice in.

Now, reports claim that hundreds of Twitter employees decided to quit rather than sign up for whatever Musk has in mind. Twitter's internal Slack channels were reportedly full of people saying that they would rather leave than work under the conditions Musk described. One added that “it will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be,” reports The Verge.

The same report claims that some critical teams are now either completely devoid of staff or close to it, with one employee saying that Twitter wouldn't be able to function after one team left. Others said that the "Command Center" team, full of engineers on 24/7 call, is also affected. They say that there will be nobody around to deal with things when they break.

Perhaps just as notable is the fact that Musk's Twitter Blue project is also impacted, with the designers leading the project said to have left the company.

So far, Musk's only public comments have included him saying that he isn't worried because "the best people are staying" and that Twitter recently hit an all-time high for usage.

With Twitter now seemingly extremely short of important team members - and entire teams - it remains to be seen where things go from here. Many are already downloading their Twitter data just in case, while others are looking for ways to stay in touch with their online community should the worst happen.