Mass Layoffs Rock Twitter As Elon Musk Admits Massive Drop In Revenue

0
Elon Musk

Microblogging site, Twitter temporarily closed its offices on Friday and cut workers’ access to internal systems as it began laying off staff.

This is coming a week after Tesla boss, Elon Musk took over the ownership of the social media platform.

The firings came as Musk tweeted that the company had experienced “a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Some staff woke up on Friday to find they were locked out of their laptops and their access to the company Gmail and Slack had been revoked.

Chris Younie, who works for Twitter in entertainment partnerships in the UK, tweeted: “Well this isn’t looking promising. Can’t log into emails. Mac won’t turn on. But so grateful this is happening at 3am. Really appreciate the thoughtfulness on the timing front guys…”

Musk has already fired the company’s top executives, including the former CEO Parag Agrawal. He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member.

The sackings come at a difficult moment for Musk, who paid $44bn for the company and last month said he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”. Major advertisers including Audi, General Motors, General Mills and Pfizer have paused spending on the service, concerned about the direction it will take under Musk.

Senior executives including vice president of engineering Arnaud Weber also said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday: “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked potential but I’m proud of what we accomplished,” he tweeted.

A class action lawsuit was filed on Thursday against Twitter by its employees, who argued the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.

The lawsuit also asked the San Francisco federal court to issue an order to restrict Twitter from soliciting employees being laid off to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.