Every second gone
Musk fires Twitter employees via email
11/04/2022, 7:50 p.m
The new boss Elon Musk is serious and takes a clear cut on Twitter. The first employees are already losing their IT access, including a heavily pregnant mother. A group of ex-employees are fighting back and filing a class action lawsuit.
At Twitter, job cuts began after the takeover by tech billionaire Elon Musk. As announced, laid-off employees received emails saying it was their last day at the company, financial service Bloomberg reported. Tweets from previous employees reporting on their termination increased on Twitter. “Around 50 percent” of the approximately 7,500 employees of the online platform are affected by the layoffs, according to an email from Twitter to employees that was available to the AFP news agency on Friday. There was no official information on this – and there doesn’t have to be any more since Musk completed the takeover on Thursday last week.
The social media group had announced that it would inform the workforce by e-mail by Friday, 5 p.m. Central European Time, who had to go and who could stay. “In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will undertake the difficult process of downsizing the global workforce,” the email, seen by Reuters, said. US media reported that about half of the 7,500 employees should lose their jobs.
Some employees wrote on their Twitter accounts before 5 p.m. that their access to IT was already blocked – a sign that they will probably lose their jobs. “Looks like I’m unemployed. I just got logged out of my work laptop and from [dem Kurznachrichtendienst] Slack removed,” wrote one user, who describes himself as a former senior community manager at Twitter.
A heavily pregnant Twitter employee also said that access to her work laptop was disabled a few hours after the announcement. The woman, who is eight months pregnant and already has a nine-month-old, shared a picture of herself on Twitter: “Last Thursday on SF [San Francisco] Office was really the last day Twitter was Twitter,” she wrote.
Offices temporarily closed
Employees shouldn’t even show up at the office on Friday. “If you’re in or on your way to the office, please go home,” the email said. Anyone who is allowed to stay will be informed via their official e-mail address. Those who have to leave will receive instructions on the next steps via their private email address. Until then, the offices would remain closed and all access cards would be deactivated “to ensure the security of all employees, the Twitter systems and customer data,” it said.
A group of five employees who have already been fired are fighting back: They filed a class action lawsuit against Twitter. The company did not give them 60 days notice before they were fired, as required by California and US law. The five refer to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (Warn) Act, which requires timely termination in the event of mass layoffs or plant closures.
The announcement did not come as a complete surprise to Twitter employees. Musk took over Twitter at the end of October after months of wrangling for $44 billion (around €44 billion) and immediately fired the head of the short message service, Parag Agrawal, and other key managers. Shortly before the takeover, the Washington Post quoted Musk as saying that he wanted to reduce the number of employees to 2,000.
Twice during the week meetings for all employees were called, only to be canceled hours later. Employees told Reuters they had to gather information themselves from the media, anonymous Internet forums and private chat groups.