The social media company said in an email to staff that it will notify employees by noon ET on Friday about the 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 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. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The layoffs cap a week of purges by Musk, as he demanded deep cost cuts and imposed an aggressive new work ethic across the social media company. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, previously said he planned to lay off up to 75 percent of the social media company’s current employees. (Joe Skipper/Reuters)
Corporate coldness, chaos and uncertainty
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. Musk’s first week as owner of Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty. Two company-wide meetings were scheduled, which were canceled a few hours later. Officials told Reuters they were left to gather information through media reports, private messaging groups and anonymous forums. The long-anticipated layoffs have frozen Twitter’s famously open company culture beloved by employees. Shortly after the email was sent to Twitter employees’ inboxes, hundreds of people flooded the company’s Slack instant messaging 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 instructed teams at Twitter Inc to find up to US$1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters.
