The end is nigh?

The drama surrounding Elon Musk’s chaotic reign of Twitter kicked up a notch on Thursday night, as reports filtered out of an exodus of key staff at the company leading to genuine fears over the future viability of the platform.

After his takeover of Twitter, Musk fired over half of the company’s 7,500-person workforce. Further dismissals have occurred since as the Tesla chief argued with staff on Twitter, and others bailed on the company voluntarily put off by Musk’s management style. And on Thursday more key employees exited the company ahead of Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company.

The Verge reported that hundreds of Twitter employees resigned Thursday before a deadline of 5 p.m. E.T. The billionaire had sent remaining staff an ultimatum to get on board with “Twitter 2.0” that would see employees work longer hours. Staff were required to respond “yes” on a Google form if they were in or out. Seemingly, plenty of system critical staff preferred to be out. Among a number of crucial engineers leaving, The Verge reported that the team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries left the company on Thursday.

In a thread, Fortune tech reporter Kylie Robison estimated that if the reports are true and 75 percent of the remaining staff left Twitter on Thursday then the total headcount would be down 88 percent since Musk took over the company. Robison tweeted that the 25 percent who were staying on at Twitter were likely on work visas and thus would find it harder to find new employment.

The grim news around Twitter has rather unusually played out in real-time on the platform, and on Thursday many of the top trending terms in the U.S. were related to the supposed demise of the site. #RIPTwitter, #GoodbyeTwitter and many similar hashtags were trending, with users engaging in gallows humor and fond remembrances as they anticipated the lights going out.

Below is some of the viral reaction to news of Twitter exodus on Thursday.