Hundreds of Twitter employees have resigned rather than agree to Elon Musk's "extremely hardcore" vision of "long hours at high intensity" work at the company, the New York Times reported Friday.

Other outlets and social media posts say the mass resignations are reaching into the thousands.

Musk, Twitter's new owner and chief executive, set a Thursday 5 p.m. deadline for the company's remaining employees to quit or check "yes" on a Google form asking them to commit to "a breakthrough Twitter 2.0."

Musk had laid off roughly 50% of the workforce before issuing the ultimatum to the remaining 3,700 employees. Since closing the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Musk has also fired top executives and scrapped a plan to charge most users, among other drastic changes.

Musk joked on Twitter Thursday: "How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one."

The company in recent weeks has lost key members that oversaw content moderation, misinformation monitoring and legal matters. A company lawyer last week raised a warning over's Twitter's adherence to FTC regulations under Musk.

The agency said last week it was monitoring the situation at the site.

"We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern," an FTC spokesperson told The Hill.

The series of exits leaves Twitter's future up in the air. Some users have reported issues in the past few days, from being unable to log in to having problems with two-factor authentication. Users have also claimed having trouble with downloading their archived data on the platform. Thursday night saw a spike in Twitter outages, according to DownDetector, a site that tracks disruptions.

On Friday, several hashtags, including #RIPTwitter and #TwitterShutdown gained traction.

Musk, meanwhile, has hinted at further reorganization at Twitter, and said Wednesday he would eventually look for a new CEO.

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