Tech billionaire and new Twitter owner Elon Musk has already starting laying off staff at the social media site – and he's allegedly not telling them about it.
Musk officially became owner of the micro-blogging website last month (October), completing a near £40billion deal.
And it now appears that staff are waking up this morning (November 4) to find themselves locked out of their work emails, and without a job.
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News of the mass layoffs first broke on the site when now-former staff started tweeting about it.
Simon Balmain, the former senior community manager for Twitter, wrote: “Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack.
“#OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much – so sad it had to end this way.”
And Aria Safaria who work at Twitter's product department in London, tweeted in response: “All your access suddenly shut off in the middle of the night? Same.”
Twitter officials sent an email round later on Thursday night warning of the sackings taking place just one day later.
An email leaked to the media claimed it was being done to “place Twitter on a healthy path”.
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It stated: “Team, In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.
“We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
Musk had previously claimed that he wanted to slash Twitter's workforce from 7,500 to around 2,000 – and he appears to be doing that sooner rather than later.
But in a shock twist, a class-action lawsuit was filed on Thursday in a San Francisco federal court to stop Musk's plans from going ahead.
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Top lawyer Lisa Bloom tweeted: “Law requires Twitter to give you 60 days notice of a massive layoff.
“A layoff of 50+ employees within a 30 day period qualifies.”
Citing a WARN law, which stops mass sackings happening right after a takeover, she added: “This WARN law applies to all California employers of 75+ employees, which obviously includes Twitter with its thousands of employees.
“Purpose of the law is to give laid off employees time to figure out how to handle this disruption. “And Elon completely ignores it.”
The Daily Star has reached out to Twitter for a comment.
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