Twitter began laying off the bulk of its contract workforce on Saturday, offering no warning to the affected contractors, whose number was reported to be in the thousands.
No official number had been confirmed by Sunday night, but Platformer, the tech blog that first reported the cull, said that 4,400 of 5,500 contractors were hit by the sudden dismissals.
The mass firings affected workers in content moderation, core infrastructure, real estate, engineering—and, according to one manager who spoke with Platformer’s Casey Newton, Twitter’s “child safety workflows.”
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Employees only realized they had been made redundant when they were unable to log in to their emails or company Slack channels, according to the tech blog, with reports from CNBC and Axios later confirming it. Managers were similarly kept in the dark.
“People inside are stunned,” Newton tweeted.
In an internal email obtained by Insider, Twitter officials explained to contractors that the layoffs were part of its “reprioritization and savings exercise.” (The email, according to contractors who spoke to the outlet, was sent only after they discovered they were locked out of their accounts.)
Elon Musk made job cuts a priority immediately after assuming ownership of Twitter late last month; by Nov. 4, he’d laid off roughly half of its total workforce’s full-time employees. Musk positioned this decision as a result of being backed into a corner, saying he’d had “no choice” but to OK the terminations.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” he tweeted. “Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”
As advertisers bolted from the site and the Federal Trade Commission began “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” a number of top executives—of those who hadn’t already been fired—issued their resignations. Those who left included head of client solutions Robin Wheeler and moderation and safety leader Yoel Roth, both of whom departed less than a day after publicly aligning themselves with Musk to reassure users and advertisers that Twitter wasn’t in a death spiral.
At an all-employee meeting on Thursday, Musk told his considerably thinned workforce that bankruptcy is not out of the question, warning them to brace for “difficult times ahead.”
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