san francisco The Twitter headquarters in San Francisco was cordoned off by security forces. “Nobody is allowed in,” a security guard told Handelsblatt, while thousands of employees were informed of their dismissal by email on Friday. Around every second of the 7,500 jobs on Twitter is to be eliminated.
On Thursday, employees noticed that their company access had been switched off. Twitter employees working from home have had their laptops disabled remotely. Those who were still working in offices were asked by security to go home.
Mass layoffs began on Friday. At around 9:00 a.m. local time in San Francisco, employees received a message to their private email address informing them that their jobs would be cancelled. Those who were allowed to stay received an e-mail to the service address.
“There is pure chaos,” a former employee told the Handelsblatt on condition not to give his name. He was responsible for a critical part of Twitter’s technical infrastructure. After eight years at Twitter, he had already left the company shortly before the current wave of layoffs, but kept in close contact with his colleagues.
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The layoffs have affected so many important areas of Twitter that smooth operations are no longer possible. “There will be massive outages on Twitter. The question is no longer whether, but only how bad it will be,” said the expert. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
Press inquiries from the Handelsblatt on Twitter came to nothing, since the contact persons in the press office had also been dismissed.
According to reports from company circles, since the takeover by Musk a week earlier, two of Musk’s companions in particular had played important roles in the restructuring of Twitter: the investors David Sacks and Jason Calacanis.
Musk had to disclose text messages in the course of a court case over the $44 billion Twitter takeover. It emerged that Sacks had written to Musk in a checklist for the Twitter acquisition: “Fire useless employees (50%?)”. Calacanis had even called for 5,000 job cuts, writing, “Day Zero…sharpen your blades boys.”
Calacanis also suggested abolishing home office rules on Twitter. He suspected that this would encourage a number of employees to resign voluntarily. Musk introduced office duty a few days after the takeover on Twitter.
Musk and his companions lacked an operational plan for the takeover, the former Twitter technician told Handelsblatt. “They just wreaked havoc,” he said.
Nobody from Musk’s team took the time to evaluate the processes at Twitter. Technicians from Elon Musk’s electric car manufacturer Tesla were also involved. They called Twitter employees and asked them to name the best and worst colleagues from their teams.
In addition, the programmers were asked in the meantime to print out the code they had written during the last 30 days or the last 60 days for evaluation. “This is of course complete madness,” said the software engineer. First there was a traffic jam at the printers in the Twitter headquarters. Then the action was stopped again. “There was no plan. Everything seemed irrational,” he said.
Instead of making a conscious decision to switch off individual Twitter products and to dissolve the responsible teams, the company is paralyzed in its entire ability to act. “Even with a full staff and a highly motivated team, there are failures on huge platforms such as Facebook and Twitter,” said the expert. Twitter is now no longer able to guarantee the security of the platform around the clock.
In addition, morale among the remaining employees is low. The Handelsblatt learned from employees who were not affected by the layoffs that there were no special incentives for them to stay in the company. Another exodus of professionals from Twitter seems likely.
Musk has given very tight time frames for the development of new products. A new paid subscription for $7.99 a month should be ready within a few days. A photo circulated of Twitter product developer Esther Crawford asleep in a sleeping bag in the Twitter office. She commented, “When your team is working around the clock to meet deadlines, sometimes you have to sleep where they work.”
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While the layoffs were being announced on Twitter in San Francisco, Elon Musk was speaking at an investor conference in New York. In the future, Twitter will become one of the most valuable Internet companies in the world, he announced. However, Twitter has made a loss for eight of the past ten years.
Twitter employees who were fired on Friday received mixed messages about severance rules. The Handelsblatt learned from an employee in the US who was informed that he would continue to draw his full salary for another two months, but would be released from his work. An employee in Europe received a message saying he was likely to be affected by the termination, but no details on severance rules.
Sandra Sucher, a Harvard management professor who has been studying layoffs for more than a decade, told the New York Times that Twitter’s cuts were among the worst-handled she’s seen. While the scale is not unprecedented, it is unusual for layoffs to be carried out so quickly without detailed explanations to workers of who is being laid off and why, she said. “This is a master class in what not to do.”
Several Twitter employees had filed a lawsuit against the layoffs. They argued that Musk failed to comply with applicable US law in the mass layoffs.
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