Twitter starts mass layoff: Roughly 50% of workforce hit by layoffs, Musk blames activist groups

On late Friday, Head of Safety and Integrity at Twitter, Yoel Roth, took to the social media platform and confirmed that at least 50% of the workforce has been affected by the mass layoffs company-wide. Furthermore, he also addressed the microblogging platform's content moderation capabilities and said that they are a "top priority" in the context of the upcoming midterm elections in the United States. 

The Tesla CEO and "Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator", Elon Musk, took to the microblogging platform to say that "unfortunately there is no choice" amid the reports of the company's ongoing mass layoffs across several functions. He also claims that the company has offered three months of severance to those fired. 

The internal document says that Twitter has told the staff that 'roughly 50%' of the workforce has been hit by layoffs. 

Half of Twitter's 7,500 employees were laid off on Friday, an internal document showed, as new owner Elon Musk began a major revamp of the troubled company. "Roughly 50 per cent of the workforce will be impacted," said questions and answer email seen by AFP that was sent to Twitter employees who lost their jobs following last week's mammoth $44 billion takeover.

On Friday, Elon Musk attended an event and spike about free speech and revenue challenges. He said: "Recently we had a lot of difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter. This is despite us doing everything possible to appease them and to make it clear that moderation rules have not changed and we are continuing to enforce them. A number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter."

"So this is, this doesn't seem right because we've made no change in our operations at all. But nonetheless, activist groups have been successful in causing a massive drop in the Twitter's advertising  revenue, and we've done our absolute best to appease them and nothing is working. So this is a major concern and I think this is frankly an attack on the First Amendment. Like if activist groups can pressure advertisers upon which Twitter is fundamentally dependent to suppress free speech, then that doesn't seem right," he added. 

Simon Balmain, a former Twitter employee who was sacked on Friday, said he was "holding tight" to see how the process will play out. As quoted by the news agency Reuters he told how he was sacked as the firm cut workers' access to internal systems. 

Balmain, based in Birmingham in the English Midlands region, told Reuters that he'd received an email in the early hours of the morning detailing expected layoffs. 

Balmain describes himself in his Twitter bio as a 'Former Senior Community Manager' at Twitter. 

Balmain said: "It said that if we would be affected, we'd head to our personal email, if not to our work email. And it was about an hour after that that I found that my work laptop was remotely wiped and access to Slack and Gmail revoked." 

Elon Musk said on Friday that Twitter Inc had seen a "massive" drop in revenue. He blamed the activist groups who are apparently pressuring the advertisers. Musk said that the decline came "even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists." In his tweet, he mentioned that it is "extremely messed up! They're trying to destroy free speech in America." It was not immediately clear who Musk was referring to as "activists".

News agency Reuters reported that according to two sources familiar with the matter, Musk has directed the company to find $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings. The company is aiming to find between $1.5 million and $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services, said the Slack message, which referred to the project as "Deep Cuts Plan." 

Amid mass layoffs, the boss Elon Musk arrived at a banking conference in New York on Friday. Musk was seen getting out of a limo as he arrived at the 29th Annual Baron Investment Conference. 

Image credit: Reuters

On Friday, the microblogging site closed its offices on a temporary basis and told the employees they would be informed by email whether or not they are retained. 

As part of the global job cut, Twitter fired a large number of employees in India across verticals, including engineering, sales and marketing, and communications. According to sources, there is still no clarification on the severance payout for staff laid off in the country.