Twitter’s Singapore employees forced to walk out of office for non-payment of rent, told to work from home

Soon after he took over Twitter, Elon Musk issued an order asking Twitter’s finance departments all over the world to stop paying vendors whose services the social media platform had been using. Musk also stopped paying the rent of the various office spaces that Twitter occupies all over the world. While landlords in various cities are now planning to sue Twitter, with some of them even filing the pre-requisite paperwork to do so, things have taken an ugly turn in Singapore.

Earlier this week Twitter’s global team sent an email to Twitter employees to pack their things up, and by the end of business hours, or 5:00 PM, vacate the CapitaGreen office of Twitter, which also acts as the firm’s Asia-Pacific headquarters. However, before they could walk out of the office on their own accord, their landlord forced them to walk out of the office for non-payment of rent, said a member of Twitter’s Singapore team.

Singapore-based staffers have now been reassigned as remote workers in Twitter’s internal system until further notice, the person added. Singapore serves as Twitter’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, a region that was hit hard by deep and abrupt job cuts when new owner Elon Musk took over the San Francisco-based firm.

Twitter was previously sued for not paying rent for office space in San Francisco. As per a Bloomberg report, the land owner revealed that the social media giant was notified on December 16, 2022, that it would be in default on its lease for the 30th floor of the Hartford Building in five days unless the rent was paid.

A spokesperson for CapitaLand, the owner of its Singapore offices, told South China morning that Twitter remains a tenant at CapitaGreen without elaborating on why the employees were forced to walk out. 

Apart from not paying the rent of its headquarters and offices, Twitter has also not paid the rent or utilities for various properties that host its servers, because of which they have had to shut those spaces down. It is speculated that the reduced number of active servers was one of the reasons why Twitter suffered from a number of global outages earlier this month.

Moreover, Twitter has also stopped paying some of its key software vendors, and has refused to renew the licenses of some services that have been vital for the platform to function properly.

With the deadline for Musk to pay the $1 billion in interest that he owns for the loans he took to acquire Twitter approaching near, it only seems that Musk’s actions are only going to get drastic.

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