Elon Musk Fires 50% of Twitter Employees

Elon Musk has laid off almost half of Twitter's 7,500 employees, leaving entire teams with little or no employees, The Verge reports.

Last week, after the Twitter deal closed, Musk fired not only Twitter's senior management but also other executives at the company, including Arnaud Weber, vice president of consumer product development, and Tony Haile, a senior director of products who oversees Twitter's work with news publishers.

This week's layoffs have affected regular employees. Fired workers write that Musk's layoffs have affected the following teams: trust and product security, policy, communications, curating tweets, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility and even some core engineering teams.

Some employees at Twitter told The Verge that the scale of Musk's layoffs and decision to cut costs in areas such as cloud hosting could make it difficult for the company to maintain critical infrastructure.

The process of laying off employees began on Thursday night, shortly after an unsigned memo was sent out internally, which states:

In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.

The affected employees' work accounts were blocked long before they were notified of their employment status in another unsigned letter titled "Your role at Twitter."

Those affected by the cuts will continue to receive payments and benefits for the full period required by US federal and state law to process the dismissal, which is 60 days, according to emails sent to dismissed employees and an internal FAQ.

The layoffs also apply to employees in other countries. They have been notified that their positions have been "identified as potentially impacted or at risk of redundancy." The FAQ for employees states that the redundancies will affect "roughly 50% of the workforce."

Some dismissed Twitter employees have already filed a lawsuit against the company. They claim the company violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Act (WARN) and the California WARN Act, which requires companies to give at least 60 days' notice of mass layoffs.