Employees at Twitter prepared for widespread layoffs on Friday as Elon Musk, the company’s new owner, redesigned the social media site.
The corporation stated that employees would learn by 9 a.m. in a letter to employees that was obtained by numerous media sites. If they had been fired, it would have been PST. The number of job losses was not specified in the email.
Early on Friday, a few workers reported that they had already lost access to their work accounts. Job cuts were “essential to safeguard the company’s success moving forward,” according to the email sent to employees.
Since Musk became the company’s CEO, Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees have been preparing for layoffs. On his first day as owner of Twitter, the billionaire Tesla CEO sacked several high-ranking employees, among them CEO Parag Agrawal.
Additionally, he dismantled the company’s board of directors and replaced it with only himself. On Thursday evening, a large number of Twitter employees used the social media platform to show their support for one another. They frequently did this by tweeting blue heart emojis, which stand in for Twitter’s blue bird logo.
As of Thursday, neither Musk nor Twitter had made the impending layoffs public. It doesn’t matter whether a business is privately held or publicly listed; the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification legislation compels firms with at least 100 employees to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees.
The Employment Development Department of California has not recently received any such notices from Twitter, according to Barry C. White, a spokeswoman for the department.
The layoffs occur at a difficult time for social media firms as advertisers cut back and newcomers, particularly TikTok, challenge the more established social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., just reported its second consecutive quarter of declining revenue, and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Following lackluster earnings reports from Microsoft and even Google parent Alphabet, Meta’s results were disappointing.
