Before the wave of layoffs, the company had around 7,500 employees.
(Photo: REUTERS)
san francisco On Friday, the short message service Twitter began emailing several employees about their dismissal. The Handelsblatt found out from corporate circles. According to consistent media reports, around every second job on Twitter is to be cut. The company most recently had 7,500 employees.
Anyone who continues to be employed received a message at the office address. Employees who were made redundant received the message on their private e-mail address. Several employees reported that their work laptops were remotely disabled as early as Thursday.
The US portal Insider reported that more than 1,000 layoffs were announced within an hour. One person in New York stated that their “entire team” of more than 30 employees had been laid off.
A number of Twitter employees reported on the short message service about their terminations. Many thanked their colleagues. Some also criticized the nature of the dismissal.
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“Today is your last working day at the company,” quoted the Bloomberg news agency from an email. The messages varied by location. In Ireland, the largest Twitter subsidiary in the EU, the messages sent were different from those sent to employees at the group’s headquarters in San Francisco.
A New York-based employee received an email saying his job was “affected” but that he would remain employed until a breakup date in early February, according to a New York Times report: “During that time, you will not work and your access to the Twitter systems will be disabled.” Employees would receive severance pay details “within a week”.
At the European headquarters in Dublin, some employees were cut off from the internal computer system on Friday morning and received an email about the downsizing. “These decisions are never easy,” The New York Times quoted from the news. These depended on the country a person lives in and further information would be announced “as soon as possible”.
“Not visionary or innovative”
Twitter isn’t the only tech company in the US to be massively cutting jobs. On Thursday, ride-hailing service Lyft announced it would lay off 13 percent, or about 650, of its 5,000 employees. The payment processor Stripe announced that it would cut 14 percent of its jobs. This corresponds to around 1,100 jobs.
“There’s nothing visionary or innovative about firing employees via email,” Jesse Lehrich, founder of Accountable Tech, an organization that advocates for the industry, told Bloomberg. Musk still has no understanding of the business, but is already throwing out specialists, he criticized.
While California and federal law requires companies to give notice of mass layoffs in advance, it wasn’t clear if Musk had done so. A spokesman for California’s Employment Development Department said Thursday night, according to Bloomberg, that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs to the agency.
A class-action lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday on behalf of employees alleging they did not receive the required notice.
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