Twitter started a round of massive layoffs on Friday, November 4, notifying employees concerning the status of their jobs after closing office entrances as well as suspending their badge access to internal systems overnight.
This comes within only a week after Tesla CEO Elon musk, the new Twitter owner, tweeted on Friday that the platform was suffering a “massive drop in revenue”, due to advertisers ceasing to spend.
At a Friday conference in New York, investor Ron Baron asked how much money he would have saved after he “fired half of Twitter”, and Musk explained about the cost of running Twitter, revenue challenges, and he also blamed activist groups who are pressuring big companies to stop advertising on the platform. However, the new Twitter owner was mum on the layoffs themselves.
According to The Washington Post, an email sent to staff on Thursday evening stated:
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.
We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted. We are grateful for your contributions to Twitter and for your patience as we move through this process.”
Thousands of workers tweeted they were blocked from accessing work email and Slack channels even before receiving an official notice, which they regarded as a sure sign they had been laid off.
The company released no further details regarding the extent of the layoffs, although The Washington Post reported this week that Musk was aiming to axe about 7,500 Twitter employees, which equals to around 75% of the workforce.
The massive job cuts were part of Twitter’s effort to save $700 million in labor costs.
Based from the tweets of staff, those who worked in communications, engineering, machine learning ethics as well as product and content curation were mostly affected by the layoffs.
Lawyer Shannon Raj Singh who was acting head of human rights at Twitter, posted a tweet saying that on Friday all members of the human rights team had been cut.
Employees of premium subscription service Twitter Blue were also let go.
It is indeed a very tough time for Twitter right now, as the massive layoffs come due to advertisers holding back and newcomers, especially TikTok, are becoming more popular, thus threatening older platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Image: The Finance World