After a week of not knowing what will happen to the company now that Elon Musk owns it, Twitter will tell employees via email on Friday if they have been laid off. It will also temporarily close its offices and stop staff from getting in.
Staff will be informed of layoffs by Friday at 12 p.m. EDT/1600 p.m. GMT, according to an email from the social media company.
According to an email sent on Thursday and obtained by Reuters, the company would start the
“difficult process of reducing our global workforce” on Friday in order to “put Twitter on a healthy path.”
Twitter has said that it will temporarily shut down its offices and stop badge access “to help make sure that all employees, Twitter systems, and customer data are safe.”
All Twitter employees who are not being laid off will be notified via company email, the social media platform said.
Members of staff who have been terminated will receive an email at their personal addresses outlining their next steps, as explained in the memo.
There was a delay in getting a response from Twitter.
Musk has been asking for big budget cuts and a strict new work ethic at the social media company for the past week. This week, he finally got what he wanted: layoff notices.
Two people who know about the situation and an internal Slack message that Reuters looked at say that he has told the Twitter team to find ways to save up to $1 billion a year on infrastructure costs.
He had already eliminated the company’s top brass by dismissing the CEO and the heads of finance and legal. People in other roles, such as those in charge of advertising, marketing, and human resources, have also left the company over the past week.
The first week of Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been fraught with uncertainty and disorder. It turns out that two company-wide meetings that were planned were called off just hours before they were supposed to begin. Reuters says that workers had to learn about the direction of the company from news stories, internal chat rooms, and public message boards.
The layoffs, which had been expected for a while, have put a damper on Twitter’s once-admired open corporate culture.
Slack channels were inundated with farewell messages from hundreds of Twitter employees shortly after the email was sent, according to two employees who spoke to Reuters. Apparently, Musk was invited to join the channel by someone.
Emails sent out by Twitter on Thursday urged users to go home if they were already at or on their way to the office.
