Go Back Home, Don’t Come to Office: Elon Musk to Sack 50% of Twitter Staff

You’re fired! Elon Musk has pressed the ‘sack button’ with a vengeance. After sacking CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde immediately after acquiring Twitter, the self-described free speech absolutist was set to fire around 50% of the social media platform’s 7,500-strong workforce on Friday.

In a companywide email whose copy was seen by The New York Times (NYT), Twitter informed its employees on Thursday that “everyone will receive an individual email with the subject line: Your Role at Twitter” by “9AM PST on Friday Nov. 4th”.

“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 email reads.

Though the exact number of employees—who expected to be sacked after Musk’s takeover—set to be fired is not clear, about half of them will lose their jobs, according to previous internal messages and an investor, the NYT reported.

Expecting to be sacked, employees noted a message on the Slack messaging service suggesting 3,738 people could be laid off. According to a copy seen by NYT, changes could still be made to the list.

Asking its staff to check their emails, including the spam folders, the management informed them that all its offices will be “temporarily closed” and they should “return home” if they are in an office or on way to an office.

“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email. If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with [the] next steps via your personal email,” the email further reads.

Citing an internal source, The Washington Post reported that the employees primarily in marketing, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety departments will be sacked.

The sackings could benefit Musk with Twitter often losing money and a non-robust cashflow. The world’s richest man is under pressure to make Twitter profitable after the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. He also loaded about $13 billion in debt on Twitter for the acquisition and is on the hook to pay about $1 billion a year in interest payments, according to NYT.

In less than a week since Musk’s acquisition, the entire top management appears to have been almost entirely cleared out with the SpaceX CEO also dissolving Twitter’s former board of directors.

It wasn’t clear whether the billionaire provided advance notice of the mass lay-off, as required un federal and California laws. California’s Employment Development Department said on Thursday that no such notice was received from San Francisco-based Twitter.

Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to NYT’s requests for comment.

After the top three sackings, more executives resigned or were let go while managers were asked to draw up lists of high- and low-performing employees. More than 50 engineers and employees from Musk’s other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, were brought in to review the lay-off lists.

On Thursday, ‘Days of Rest’, which are Twitter’s monthly days off, were removed from the calendars of employees, two people with knowledge of the matter told NYT. Some workers also noticed that the employee directory had been taken offline, internal chats seen by NYT showed.

Twitter employees posted salute and heart emojis on Slack with several using the workplace hashtag #OneTeam after receiving the email and some of them had lost access to the company’s systems—a possible precursor to being fired.

Employee Rumman Chowdhury tweeted: “Has it already started? Happy layoff eve!”

Has it already started? Happy layoff eve! pic.twitter.com/0AcaQjGJvm

— Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh) November 4, 2022

Some of the employees already feared being fired after being locked out of their work email, laptops and Slack. “Just lost access to my Twitter email and Slack. This is all so unreal,” tweeted Morgan Bell.

#OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much,” senior community manager Simon Balmain tweeted. “So sad it had to end this way.”

James Luduca tweeted: “Can a heart be full and broken at the same time? It was a privilege to lead a #DreamTeam working to build the most inclusive, diverse, equitable & accessible company. I’m forever grateful. Tweeps, we created lightening in a bottle.”

Jesse Lehrich, a founder of Accountable Tech, an industry advocacy organisation, termed the layoff an “arbitrary purge” just days before the US Midterm Elections on November 8.

Before Musk “even seems to have a basic grasp of the business, there is nothing visionary or innovative about summarily firing” workers by email, especially people who have “specialised expertise and deep institutional knowledge”, Lehrich told NYT.

Musk has also directed Twitter teams to slash annual infrastructure costs by $1 billion, two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message revealed.

The microblogging platform aims to save $1.5 million-$3 million daily from servers and cloud services, according to the Slack message, seen by Reuters, which referred to the project as ‘Deep Cuts Plan’. Twitter is currently losing about $3 million a day “with all spending and revenue considered” an internal document revealed.

The steep infrastructure cuts could put the Twitter website and app at risk of going down during major crises or important political events, the sources told Reuters.

“(Musk) is willing to introduce that risk to meet these goals,” one of the sources said adding that Twitter is exploring whether to cut extra server space kept to ensure it can handle high traffic.

Terming the proposed cuts as “delusional”, the second source said, “When user traffic kicks up, the service can fail in spectacular ways.”

Twitter teams are racing to present a plan to achieve the cuts by a November 7 deadline, according to one of the sources and the Slack message. Some employees have been ordered to work without offs to meet the deadline, the source added.

Twitter Down For Several Users In India

Meanwhile, amid the lay-off shock, several Twitter users in India said that they were unable to log into the website on Friday though it was back online after several hours.

A pop-up reading “Something went wrong, but don’t fret—let’s give it another shot” appeared when the feed page first loaded.

“I’m unable to access Twitter and getting an error prompt ... Something went wrong, but don’t fret—let’s give it another shot. Try again,” a Twitter user posted.

Outage reporting website DownDetector also reported that many users were facing issues with Twitter’s website.

Reportedly, the outage started around 3 am and spiked around 7 am.