Yesterday, Twitter laid off thousands of employees in departments across the company, in a severe round of cost cutting that could potentially upend how one of the world’s most influential platforms operates one week after it was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, reports CNN.
Numerous Twitter employees began posting on the platform Thursday night and Friday morning that they had already been locked out of their company email accounts ahead of the planned layoff notification. Some also shared blue hearts and salute emojis indicating they were out at the company.
By Friday morning, Twitter employees from departments including ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness and other teams had tweeted about having been let go. Members of the curation team, which help elevate reliable information on the platform, including about elections, were also laid off, according to employee posts.
Another employee said that she and other members of Twitter’s human rights team had been laid off.
Simon Balmain, a former Twitter senior community manager who was laid off Friday, said in an interview with CNN that he lost access to Slack, email and other internal systems around 8 hours before receiving an email Friday morning officially notifying him that he’d been fired. He added that the lay off email „still didn’t provide any details really” about why he’d been let go.
While Twitter employees were posting about being laid off, Musk on Friday appeared for a friendly interview at an investor conference and spoke about making cheaper electric vehicles and his ambitions to go to Mars. The interviewer said that Musk had laid off „half of Twitter” and Musk nodded, although he did not comment on the remark.
In a series of tweets Friday evening, Yoel Roth, head of Twitter’s trust and safety team, confirmed overall headcount was cut by roughly 50%. The layoffs eliminated 15% of the company’s trust and safety team, leading to reductions in customer service but little change to content moderation, says Roth.
Twitter had about 7,500 workers prior to Musk’s takeover, meaning roughly 3,700 employees were laid off. The cuts come as Musk attempts to improve the company’s bottom line after taking out significant debt financing to fund his $44 billion acquisition.
Several Twitter employees on Thursday night filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Twitter is in violation of the federal and California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) after laying off some employees already.
The WARN Act requires that an employer with more than 100 employees must provide 60 days’ advanced written notice prior to a mass layoff „affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment”.
„Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has made clear that he believes complying with federal labor laws is ‘trivial'”, Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement to CNN. „We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter be held accountable to our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly signing away their rights”. California’s Employment Development Department confirmed to CNN that no WARN notices had been filed by Twitter as of midday Friday.
Separately, other labor lawyers told CNN Friday they had begun receiving inquiries from Twitter employees questioning whether their terminations may have been unlawfully discriminatory or retaliatory.
Beyond the potential for lawsuits arising from the layoffs, other legal experts say Musk’s handling of the cuts may well create further problems for him down the road — whether in terms of attracting future talent or by keeping remaining workers satisfied.
Musk started his tenure at Twitter by firing CEO Parag Agrawal and two other executives, and in less than a week since Musk acquired the company, its C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations. Musk has also dissolved Twitter’s former board of directors.
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