Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

UPDATE: Based on tweets from employees showing that they’ve lost access to their work emails and Slack, layoffs are starting to happen:

All your access suddenly shut off in the middle of the night? Same

— ariasafaria (@SrinivasanAria) November 4, 2022

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

— Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh) November 4, 2022

According to an internal memo sent to Twitter employees, the new management under Elon Musk will begin conducting layoffs Friday morning. These layoffs have been rumored since before Musk’s takeover, with the most recent report estimating that half of the 7,500 employees will lose their jobs.

On Thursday evening, all employees received an email stating that they will be informed of their employment status at 9 A.M. PT on Friday. Each email will be sent with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.” If an employee is keeping their job, they’ll be notified via their work email — if they’re let go, they’ll be notified on a personal address.

“To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” the email reads. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.”

The email was impersonally signed “Twitter.”

According to a post from a Twitter employee, staff members have been flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow. (Update: the tweet has since been deleted.)

Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code.

Still, it’s not clear what divisions of the company will be impacted. At Tesla, Musk axed the entire PR team a few years ago — by that notion, it’s likely that he will get rid of Twitter’s PR team.

Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments.

According to a report from Platformer, Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets.

When Musk first took over last week, he immediately fired four key executives: CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde. Twitter’s Chief Consumer Officer Sarah Personette and Chief of People and Diversity Dalana Brand resigned the following day.

This story is developing…

Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch