Reports suggest up to 3,700 — about 50% of staff — could end up being given their marching orders.
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Elon Musk has begun making huge job cuts at Twitter — less than a week after he acquired the social network.
Offices were temporarily closed, with staff stopped from accessing internal systems.
Those losing their job were informed through an email to their personal address.
Reports suggest up to 3,700 — about 50% of staff — could end up being given their marching orders.
There's speculation that the entire curation team have been dismissed, with critics warning this will make Twitter "noisier, more dangerous and less interesting."
It's also difficult to see how Musk will achieve his efforts to tackle spam bots after such a drastic reduction in talent.
Class Action Lawsuit in Works
The tech giant's staff have faced months of uncertainty as the messy takeover progressed — according to Bloomberg News, a class action lawsuit has now been filed in a federal court in San Francisco over the layoffs.
And in a sign that things will get challenging for staff who remain, Musk has canceled "days of rest" — with warnings Twitter's remote work policy is facing the ax.
It's worth noting that Twitter was in dire straits even before the world's richest man swooped in to snap up the micro-blogging site — and job cuts would have happened anyway.
As Friday's chaos unfolded, Musk was continuing to tweet random things as usual, including:
"Why is small talk even legal?"
The likes of Volkswagen and Pfizer have already announced that they're planning to pull advertising from the site.
Musk claims Twitter has suffered a "massive drop in revenue" because "activist groups" are pressuring brands to stop taking out ads on the social network... "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."
