California and federal laws require companies to notify workers in advance of mass layoffs. On Friday, five former Twitter workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for failing to give advance notice of the cuts. Musk already faces legal challenges from the layoffs. “If you were going to rank order ways to upset people, telling them you’re going to do it in advance, without rationale, that is a particularly inhumane way to treat them.” “This is a master class in how not to do it,” Ms. Civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that loosening Twitter’s content rules might lead to a rise in toxic speech. That pullback accelerated on Friday as advertisers like Volkswagen Group joined the growing boycott. Yet the company has lost money for eight of the past 10 years and, like other social media companies, faces a decline in digital advertising amid a slowing economy.Īt the same time, some advertisers, which provide 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, have paused their spending on the platform, citing fears over how the site’s content might change under Mr. He is under financial pressure to make the deal work, having taken on $13 billion in debt for the buyout. Musk, 51, faces numerous challenges at Twitter, which he has taken private. The actions raise questions about how the world’s richest man can effectively operate the social media service and carry out his ambitious plans for it, including adding new product features, boosting the number of users and finding other revenue streams. Musk closed his blockbuster $44 billion buyout of the company. The layoffs leave Twitter significantly changed just over a week after Mr. “I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly.” “I realize many are angry with me,” he wrote. On Saturday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, apologized to the company’s former and current employees in a tweet. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. “Really appreciate the thoughtfulness on the timing front guys.”īy early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. “So grateful this is happening at 3am,” Mr. Chris Younie, a member of the partnerships team based in London, discovered he had been laid off when he checked his corporate laptop and email account after midnight and could not access the internal systems. The cuts were so haphazard that at one late-night meeting about the Twitter Blue subscription product, at least one worker was locked out of the company’s systems during the call, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting and internal messages viewed by The New York Times. Some learned they were unemployed in the middle of their night. In Twitter’s offices in Ireland and Britain, employees stayed up late waiting for the San Francisco headquarters to inform them of their job status. Yet they received no official word about termination and some of their Slack accounts still worked. The first sign that some of the company’s 7,500 employees had been laid off came when their email accounts were shut off late Thursday. SAN FRANCISCO - When the ax came down at Twitter on Friday, it did not fall smoothly.
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