Twitter employees prepared themselves for huge layoffs on Friday as new owner Elon Musk prepares to make significant changes to the social site.
The corporation informed workers in a letter that was received by numerous news organisations that they would know by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) whether or not they had been terminated from their positions. The number of workers whose positions will be eliminated was not specified in the email.
Early on Friday, a number of workers revealed through Twitter that they had already been locked out of their work accounts. In the email sent to employees, it was said that job cuts were “essential to safeguard the success of the firm moving ahead.
Since Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company’s roughly 7,500 employees have been bracing themselves for possible layoffs. On his very first day as the owner of Twitter, the wealthy former CEO of Tesla sacked some of the company’s senior executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.
In addition to this, he overthrew the firm’s board of directors and appointed himself as the only director of the corporation. On Thursday night, a large number of Twitter employees went on the social media platform to show their support for one another. Most of the time, they did this by simply tweeting blue heart emojis to represent Twitter’s blue bird logo, and they also used salute emojis in their replies to one another.
As of Thursday, neither Musk nor Twitter had made any announcements to the public on the forthcoming layoffs. Despite the fact that firms with at least 100 workers are required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification legislation to notify layoffs involving 500 or more employees, this is the case. This is the case regardless of whether a company is publicly listed or privately held.
Thursday, Barry C. White, a spokeswoman for the Employment Development Department of the state of California, stated that the agency has not received any recent notices of this kind from Twitter. White claimed that the department has not received any recent notifications from Twitter.
On Thursday, a class action lawsuit was submitted to the federal court in San Francisco on behalf of four employees, one of whom had been terminated from their position, and three of whom had their work accounts frozen. It asserts that Twitter has broken the law by failing to provide the requisite notice of its intention to lay off further employees and that it has the intention to lay off additional employees.
The layoffs come at a difficult moment for social media businesses, as advertisers are cutting back and newcomers, like TikTok, are posing a challenge to the more established social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
The parent company of Facebook, Meta Platforms Inc., just reported its second quarterly revenue decrease in the history of the corporation, and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. After receiving lacklustre earnings reports from Google’s parent company Alphabet and even Microsoft, Meta’s disappointing results followed suit.