Twitter will inform employees by email on Friday whether they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and barring staff access, after a week of uncertainty over the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk.
The social media company said in an email to staff that it will notify employees Friday at noon ET about the staff cuts.
“In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email, seen by Reuters.
Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all access to the badge will be suspended to “help ensure the safety of each employee, as well as Twitter’s systems and customer data.”
The social media platform said Twitter employees who will not be affected by the layoffs will be notified via work email addresses.
Staff who have been terminated will be notified of next steps at their personal email addresses, according to the memo.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The layoffs cap a week of purges by Musk, as he demanded deep cost cuts and imposed an aggressive new work ethic at the social media company.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, had previously said he planned to lay off up to 75 percent of the social media company’s current employees. (Joe Skipper/Reuters)
Corporate chill, chaos and uncertainty
He had already removed the company’s top brass, firing its chief executive and senior financial and legal executives. Others, including those in the company’s advertising, marketing and human resources divisions, left in the past week.
Musk’s first week as owner of Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty. Two company-wide meetings were scheduled, which were canceled a few hours later. Employees told Reuters they had to gather information through media reports, private messaging groups and anonymous forums.
The long-awaited layoffs have chilled Twitter’s famously open corporate culture revered by employees.
Shortly after the email hit the inboxes of Twitter employees, hundreds of people flooded the company’s Slack instant messaging channels to say goodbye, two employees told Reuters. Someone invited Musk to join the channel, the sources said.
“If you are in an office or going to an office, go home,” Twitter said in the email Thursday.
Musk has also directed Twitter Inc teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters.