A receptionist works October 26 in the lobby of the Twitter office building in New York.
Mary Altaffer / AP
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Mary Altaffer / AP
A receptionist works October 26 in the lobby of the Twitter office building in New York.
Mary Altaffer / AP
NEW YORK – Employees braced for widespread layoffs at Twitter on Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauled the social platform.
In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they were fired. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.
Several employees tweeted early Friday that they had lost access to their work accounts. An email to employees said the job cuts were “necessary to ensure the company’s future success.”
About 7,500 Twitter employees have been expected to be laid off since Musk took the helm of the company. Billionaire Tesla CEO fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as a Twitter owner.
He also removed the company’s board and became the sole board member himself. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to show support for one another – often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to represent Twitter’s blue bird symbol – and salute the emojis when replying to each other.
As of Thursday, Musk and Twitter have made no public announcements about the upcoming layoffs. That is, although the Notice of Employee Adjustment and Retraining Regulations requires employers with at least 100 workers to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees, regardless of job company is publicly or privately traded.
Barry C. White, a spokesman for the California Department of Employment Development, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent announcements from Twitter.
A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others whose work accounts were locked. It alleges that Twitter intended to lay off more employees and broke the law by not providing the necessary notice.
The layoffs come at a difficult time for social media companies, as advertisers are downsizing and newcomers – mainly TikTok – are threatening the media platform class. older social media like Twitter and Facebook.
Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, recently posted an historic second-quarter revenue decline, and its stock is trading at its lowest level since 2015. Disappointing results for Facebook Inc. The following meta reported weak earnings from Google’s parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.
