After informing staff that they would get a notification of their employment status through email later in the day, Twitter Inc. temporarily closed its doors on Friday.
Elon Musk, the company’s new CEO and owner, plans to reduce costs at the social media network he just paid $44 billion (€44.9 billion) for by cutting around 3,700 positions, or about half of its workforce.
In order to “help safeguard the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data,” Twitter announced in an email that its offices would be temporarily closed and all credential access would be suspended.
Early on Friday, a number of workers reported that they had already lost access to their work accounts.
Since Musk became the company’s CEO, Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees have been preparing for layoffs. On his first day as owner of Twitter, the billionaire Tesla CEO sacked several high-ranking employees, among them CEO Parag Agrawal.
Additionally, he dismantled the company’s board of directors and replaced it with only himself. Many Twitter employees used Twitter on Thursday night to encourage one another, frequently tweeting blue heart emoticons to represent Twitter’s blue bird emblem and salute emojis in response to each other.
As of Thursday, neither Musk nor Twitter had made the impending layoffs public. It doesn’t matter whether a company is privately held or publicly listed; the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act compel employers with at least 100 employees to announce layoffs involving 500 or more people.
The Employment Development Department of California has not recently received any such notices from Twitter, according to Barry C. White, a spokeswoman for the department.
The layoffs occur at a difficult time for social media businesses as advertisers cut back and newcomers, particularly TikTok, challenge the more established social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., just reported its second consecutive quarter of declining revenue, and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Following lackluster earnings reports from Microsoft and even Google parent Alphabet, Meta’s results were disappointing.
