Elon Musk begins mass layoffs at Twitter today

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday. We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

This is the email all 7,500 Twitter employees received on Thursday. And it is the first company-wide communication all employees received after the takeover by Elon Musk a week ago. The employees will be notified by email by 9.00a.m. Pacific Standard Time (17:00 Thursday, West Africa Time (WAT)) on Friday whether they still have a job or not.

It will be the longest 24 hours for many of these employees and it is certainly going to be a weekend of mixed feelings for the employees.

It is not quite clear how many people will be let go however Bloomberg reports that the social media company may let go of 50% of its workforce.

Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”

The company explained that “if an employee is keeping their job, they’ll be notified via their work email — if they’re let go, they’ll be notified at a personal address. 

The New York Times reports that as the email landed in employee inboxes on Thursday evening, workers posted salute emojis and heart emojis in Slack, the messaging service. Later in the evening, some employees said they had lost access to the company’s systems, a possible prelude to being laid off.

The job cut is in a bid to reduce costs following his $44 billion acquisition, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In a related incident, Elon Musk has ordered Twitter executives to find $1 billion in annual cloud and infrastructure cost savings, as he says the company is losing about $3 million a day.

Tough times for Twitter employees I must say. Bloomberg reports that Musk has removed “days of rest” from Twitter Inc. staff calendars, according to people familiar with the matter. The monthly, company-wide day off was introduced during the pandemic period. Its expiration is another sign of Musk’s impatience with Twitter’s existing work culture.