After a week of uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, Twitter will tell employees by email on Friday if they have been laid off. The company will also temporarily close its offices and stop staff from getting in.
In an email to employees, the social media company said that staff cuts would be announced by 9 a.m. Pacific time (12 p.m. EDT/1600 GMT) on Friday.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email sent on Thursday, seen by Reuters.
Related: Musk disputes claims that he is letting go of Twitter personnel in an effort to avoid paying them.
Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”
The social media platform said Twitter employees who are not affected by the layoffs will be notified via their work email addresses.
The memo said that employees who have been fired will get information about what to do next with their personal email addresses.
Some employees tweeted that they couldn’t get into the company’s IT system, and they worried that this meant they might be fired.
“Looks like I’m unemployed, y’all.” “Just got locked out of my work laptop from afar and kicked off Slack.” A Twitter user with the handle @SBkcrn, who used to be a senior community manager there, tweeted about it.
When asked for a comment, Twitter didn’t answer right away.
The notice of layoffs is the last step in a week of purges that Musk ordered at the social media company because he wanted to cut costs deeply and make everyone work harder.
Two people who know about the situation and an internal Slack message read by Reuters say that he has told Twitter’s teams to find ways to save up to $1 billion a year on infrastructure costs.
He had already cleared out the company’s senior ranks, firing its chief executive and top finance and legal executives. Others have left the company over the past week, including those in charge of advertising, marketing, and human resources.
Musk’s first week as the owner of Twitter has been full of chaos and unknowns. Two meetings for the whole company were set up, but they were cancelled just hours later. Employees told Reuters that they had to piece together information from news stories, private message groups, and forums where no one could be identified.
The layoffs, which had been expected for a long time, have changed Twitter’s famously open work culture, which its employees have always loved.
Thursday’s email from Twitter said, “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please go home.”
Related: Analysis: The challenging part is now for Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
Two Twitter employees told Reuters that as soon as the email hit their inboxes, hundreds of people flooded the company’s Slack channels to say goodbye. Sources say that someone asked Musk to join the channel.
