According to Casey Newton of Platformer, Twitter is eliminating its contractual staff across various fields, including content moderation and marketing. The contingent workers got no notice from the company. They were removed from the Slack channels and stripped of the official email with no prior information. Even Twitter’s internal staff was unaware. Managers figured out this layoff when their workers disappeared from the system. “One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” a Twitter manager posted on Slack. Worse yet, some contract workers realized they have been fired only after Newton’s tweets about the layoff. They checked their Slack and emails to find out that they have already lost access to those. Multiple people have confirmed this layoff in Newton’s Twitter thread. The source claims Twitter fired about 4,400 of its roughly 5,500 contract employees. As said earlier, this mass layoff of contingent workers comes just days after Twitter fired almost as many employees. A massive reshuffle of internal teams followed, leaving many groups with no leaders. Some contractual workers are worried if they will get paid as they don’t have anyone from the company to report to. To make matters worse, Twitter has reportedly laid off its entire communications staff. So there’s no one to respond to queries too.
More Twitter workers lose their employment
Elon Musk cited rising operational costs for the mass layoff. He said the company is losing over $4 million every day. Unfortunately, a reduced workforce means more work burden for those still at Twitter. Since fewer people are working in each field, it could get difficult to address errors on time. Maybe, the recent failure of the revamped Twitter Blue is a result of this. The social network withdrew the feature just a couple of days after its launch. Musk’s reckless handling of Twitter operations hasn’t gone unnoticed by law enforcement agencies. The FTC has already confirmed that it is monitoring the developments, while US president Joe Biden has also hinted at a potential investigation. A Twitter lawyer has said that the new owner is risking billions in fines. Time will tell where the social media behemoth ends up under Elon Musk’s ownership. We will keep you posted.
