Users are about to flood Twitter for the start of the World Cup just as hundreds of employees are rejecting Elon Musk and quitting

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Twitter users are expected to flood the platform with the World Cup kicking off this weekend just as hundreds of employees resigned en masse, rejecting new owner Elon Musk’s demands for the company. 

The World Cup is soccer’s most prestigious tournament held every four years and is watched by billions of people worldwide. The competition has put Twitter under a heavy strain in the past — and this year looks no different.

According to a press release from Twitter Marketing one year ago, “78.2% of people on Twitter said they regularly watch, follow, or have an interest in football.” 

The same release said conversations on Twitter about football rose 42% from 2019 to 2021. 

As of March, the number of tweets about the upcoming World Cup was already up 425% month-over-month, a release from Twitter Marketing UK said. 

At the time of the release, there had already been 41 million tweets about football in the UK in 2022 alone, which was a 10% increase from the year before. 

In 2014, the World Cup set the record for tweets per minute, doubling the current average of roughly 350,000 tweets a minute.

And in 2018, Twitter boasted of its “massive role” in World Cup fandom that year and live matches, which fueled 115 billion views of tweets with the World Cup’s hashtag. Accusations of corruption and human rights abuses by the host of this year’s event, Qatar, could drive even more debate on Twitter than usual.

But as hundreds of Twitter employees depart the company, the remaining staff will face major challenges to ensure the app runs smoothly during the event. 

The bird-app’s new CEO, Elon Musk, unleashed massive layoffs beginning on November 3, slashing the company’s employee list by at least 3,200. 

On Wednesday, Musk sent around an email giving the remaining Twitter employees an ultimatum: Stay at the company and embrace Musk’s “extremely hardcore” vision or resign with three months’ severance. 

A Google form used to select whether to stay or to go showed that less than half of the company’s remaining 4,000 employees chose to stay in their jobs and work for Musk’s self-described “Twitter 2.0.”

Twitter is already facing strain on its app, with users have complained about “likes” of tweets not sticking, notifications not showing up, and feeds refreshing constantly or incorrectly, prompting a major uptick in visits to Twitter’s Help Page, according to data from Similarweb provided to Insider.

Supporting a major event, like the World Cup, will come with challenges for the skeleton staff, including workers tasked with keeping up critical services that keep the site running.

There are fewer employees to fill around-the-clock shifts for critical services, one worker told Insider. As a result, employees in critical services are now frantically trying to train people in other parts of the company to help ease the workload.

Another Twitter employee said “outages of some kind” during the World Cup were almost certain, while another noted, “really, it’s unclear what can crash until things actually crash.” A former employee, who left before Musk’s takeover, said the loss of much-needed staff meant “the infrastructure will be less scalable to meet the demands of higher site usage.”