(AP) NEW YORK — Employees at Twitter prepared for widespread layoffs on Friday as Elon Musk, the company’s new owner, redesigned the social media site.
The corporation promised that workers would learn if they had been let go by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time in a letter to staff that was obtained by numerous media sites. 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.
He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member.
On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other — often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo — and salute emojis in replies to each other.
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.
On behalf of three additional employees who were locked out of their work accounts and one employee who was laid off, a class action lawsuit was submitted on Thursday to the federal court in San Francisco. It claims that by failing to give the requisite notice, Twitter broke the law and intends to fire further employees.
The layoffs occur at a difficult time for social media businesses 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 negative earnings reports from Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet, Meta’s results were disappointing.
Elon Musk’s Twitter staff prepares for layoffs
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