Business, Lifestyle, News, Social Media

Twitter employees will be told by email today if they are fired or not

Luis Monzon

4th November 2022

Half of the Twitter workforce is set to be fired by the end of Friday.
According to an internal communication, employees will be notified via email if they will continue working at Twitter or not.
A class action lawsuit has now been levied against the Elon Musk-owned social media firm as some staffers say it’s illegal that they are being let go without enough of a notice period.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been a circus. The first week of the reign of the “Chief Twit” has left the once-generally quiet social media company in certain pandaemonium.

Now, Twitter is set on firing a large portion of its staff, reportedly around 50 percent, according to several publications.

Employees will be notified via emails sent out on Friday if they are to be laid off or not. The email firings are happening due to the company wanting to make the process as quick as possible, according to an internal email sent to Twitter’s workforce.

Here's the first official communication from Twitter's new leadership to its staff, a week after Musk took over: a fun game where you get to find out if you're laid off or not based by 9am tomorrow, based on whether the email pops up in your Twitter account or personal account. pic.twitter.com/tpJsAkiaHp

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) November 4, 2022

“We recognise 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,” reads the email from Twitter to its employees, verified as legitimate by Reuters.

The way it will apparently work is that employees will be receiving emails to their Twitter and personal email addresses that will indicate to them whether or not they will be fired at 9:00 Pacific time (18:00 South African time) Friday.

If they receive an email to their Twitter account, they will not be fired, but if they receive one to their personal account then they will be. These emails will also contain “a notification with next steps.”

With 50 percent of the workforce to be let go, according to The Guardian, there is a good chance that 3 750 employees could be severed via email before the end of the day.

Twitter is also closing its offices today to “help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customers data.” All employee badge access will also be suspended. This will mean that fired workers will not be able to retrieve their office possessions.

We imagine this will exclude one badge in particular. Employees are also being urged to return home if they are currently in an office or on their way to Twitter’s offices.

“We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through whether or not you are impacted,” the email reads. However, it seems that employees at the company will not be taking the lay-offs sitting down.

Bloomberg has reported that a class-action lawsuit has been filed in a San Francisco federal court. The employees that filed the lawsuit say that Twitter is eliminating employees without giving enough of a notice period, which is in violation of federal and California law.

Usually, companies will give employees in California will give 60 days of notice before letting them go. However, Twitter’s lawyers can argue that mass layoffs have been in the works for a few months now.

We covered reports near the end of October about how Musk was looking to lay off around 75 percent of Twitter’s staff – 5 500 employees – in a turnaround strategy for the company which has been operating at a $270 million.

It later turned out that these initial reports on cuts by Musk were overblown.

It was revealed at that time that Twitter was already planning mass cuts to staff even before the Musk acquisition. Following similar trends to the rest of the tech industry amid a worldwide economic downturn.

In September, fellow social media mainstay Meta also began quietly reducing staff to cut costs.

Musk has reportedly not addressed the staff about the cuts or laid off his plans for the future of his company.

Workers at Twitter have had to find information about their own professional fates for themselves through internal messages boards, reports from the media and even trying to decipher tweets from Musk and his advertisers for clues.

This comes as rumours of a crunch happening at Twitter, where some staffers have been sleeping at the office in order to hastily push out Musk’s changes to the platform before the end of the week.