SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter will alert employees by 9am Pacific time on Friday (Saturday midnight in Singapore) about whether they will be laid off, the company said in an e-mail to staff on Thursday.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the e-mail seen by Reuters.
Twitter said in the e-mail that its offices will be temporarily closed, and all badge access will be suspended “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data”.
Billionaire Elon Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter’s workforce, making good on plans to slash costs at the social media platform he acquired for US$44 billion (S$62 billion) last month, people with knowledge of the matter have said.
All told, Mr Musk wants to cut about 3,700 jobs, people with knowledge of the matter said this week.
The entrepreneur had begun dropping hints about his staffing priorities before the deal closed, saying he wants to focus on the core product. “Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost,” he tweeted in early October.
Twitter was sued over the layoff plan, which workers say the company is doing without enough notice in violation of federal and California law. A class-action lawsuit was filed on Thursday in San Francisco federal court.
The federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act restricts large companies from mounting mass layoffs without at least 60 days of advance notice.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an order requiring Twitter to obey the Act, and restricting the company from soliciting employees to sign documents that could give up their right to participate in litigation.
“We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt to make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” said attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed Thursday’s complaint.
Security staff at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carried out preparations for layoffs, while an internal directory used to look up colleagues was taken offline on Thursday afternoon, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Employees have been girding for firings for weeks. In recent days, they raced to connect via LinkedIn and other non-Twitter avenues, offering one another advice on how to weather losing one’s job, the people said.
Former Twitter engineers are also using social media to respond to former “Tweeps” looking to land jobs elsewhere.
Mr Musk has also been huddling with advisers to come up with new ways to make money from the blogging platform, including charging for verifications, which can help delineate real users from fake accounts.
He is also considering reviving a long-since-discontinued short-video tool called Vine, a way to vie with popular video-sharing apps like TikTok.
Another product under consideration, The New York Times reported, is paid direct messages, which would let the rank and file send private messages to high-profile users. BLOOMBERG
