According to internal conversations with CNBC by full-time Twitter employees, several of Twitter’s contract workers realized they were abruptly fired over the weekend after they lost access to Slack and other work tools.
According to the IT news website Platformer, which broke the news of the downsizing first, 4,400 of its 5,500 contract employees were reportedly laid off. The entire number has not been confirmed by CNBC.
Some of Twitter’s contract employees were based abroad, including in India. As they were not authorized to speak on behalf of Twitter, full-time workers who asked to remain anonymous stated they received no internal notification before the contractors they were working with were fired.
Employees at Twitter claim that the entire internal communications team has been fired. They made sour jokes about how the company’s media coverage now serves as internal communications.
The termination of contractors’ projects would be the most recent layoff at Twitter, which had previously let go of roughly half of its workforce since Elon Musk acquired the company on October 28.
A day after the layoffs, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey issued an apology last week for growing the business “too quickly.” Dorsey rolled his own shares into the new holding company and personally pushed Musk to acquire his business in a protracted leveraged buyout.
According to paperwork submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter had about 2,000 employees as of June 30, 2013, just before it went public. The business said that by year’s end, it now employed about 7,500 people full-time.
On Nov. 4, Musk tweeted about the layoffs, saying: “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, regrettably there is no choice when the firm is losing over $4M/day. Everyone who was let go received a 3-month severance package, which is 50% more than what was legally required.
Since taking over, Musk has told the remaining Twitter employees that he sold shares in his electric vehicle company, Tesla, worth billions of dollars to “rescue” Twitter. It’s unclear if he will keep selling Tesla shares to reduce Twitter’s debt.
Additionally, he warned Twitter staff that bankruptcy was a possibility given the current state of the economy and the fact that some advertisers have stopped or reduced their support of the company since he took charge.
