Following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late October, the microblogging platform created chaos by firing about 50 percent of its workforce all around the world.
Almost 3,700 employees from different teams such as trust and safety, communications, content curation, human rights, engineering, and machine learning ethics, were asked to go.
While Twitter fired most of the employees over an email, some employees realized that they had lost their job only after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, was unexpectedly revoked.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the internal email stated.
It added that “everyone will receive an individual email”.
Musk said that he had to lay off employees to reduce costs and make the company profitable.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
Now, in a sudden U-turn, the management at Twitter is reportedly reaching out to dozens of employees who were laid off and asking them to return, according to a new report from Bloomberg citing sources close to the development.
The report states some of the fired employees were laid off by mistake, suggesting that the decisions taken by the company have been rushed and chaotic.
Others were let off before management understood that their work and experience “may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions” for iOS and Android.
Currently, with only close to 3,700 employees remaining at Twitter, Musk is pushing them to move quickly to implement new features so much so that in some cases employees have even slept at the office to meet new deadlines.
Ever since Musk’s formal takeover, Twitter is going through a revamp with the company announcing plans to introduce a new moderation policy and updated Twitter Blue subscription.
Twitter Blue users will now need to pay $7.99 per month to get a blue checkmark or verification badge for their accounts. This subscription offers new features such as lesser ads, longer videos, and priority ranking for quality content posted on the site.
Currently, the subscription is available only for select markets including the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
Besides this, the microblogging platform will soon add the ability to attach long-form text to tweets and edit tweets, which was previously available only to paid subscribers of Twitter Blue.
