Twitter will notify employees via email on Friday whether they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and barring staff access, after a week of uncertainty over the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk. The social media company said in an email to staff that it would notify employees by 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday (12 p.m. EDT/1600 GMT) regarding staff cuts. “In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email, seen by Reuters. Twitter said its offices would be temporarily closed and all badged access would be suspended in order to “help ensure the security of every employee, as well as Twitter systems and customer data.” The social media platform said Twitter employees not affected by the layoffs will be notified through their work email addresses. Laid-off staff will be notified of next steps at their personal email addresses, the memo said. The layoff announcement caps a week of purges by Musk, as he demanded deep cost cuts and imposed an aggressive new work ethic across the social media company. He had already purged the company’s upper echelons, firing its CEO and top financial and legal officials. Others, including those at the top of the company’s advertising, marketing and human resources departments, left last week. The layoffs, long expected, have frozen Twitter’s famously open corporate culture that has been revered by its employees. Shortly after the email was sent to Twitter employees’ inboxes, hundreds of people flooded the company’s Slack channels to say goodbye, two employees told Reuters. Someone invited Musk to join the channel, the sources said. “If you are in an office or going to an office, please go home,” Twitter said in the email Thursday. Musk also directed teams at Twitter Inc to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters. Reuters
