“we will Twitter…it was real, and it was fun. “But the ending wasn’t really fun,” a former employee of the company’s Global Wellness team wrote last night. He was among the 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 or so employees are laid off by new owner Elon Musk this week.
Others offered to tell popular culture references.
“Has the red wedding started?” One employee wrote on Slack, to me The New York Times, just minutes before the company sent an email announcing layoffs.
Previous employees reported language difference in notifications sent to them. Some samples:
- “We are aware that this will affect a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success going forward.”
- “…we are writing to inform you that your Twitter role has been determined to be likely to be affected or at risk of recurrence.”
- “During this time, you will be on an inactivity notice period and your access to Twitter’s systems will be deactivated.”
Several departing employees were notified by email. Or as someone put it, “The official (and very dehumanizing) email has been received. Other employees have simply been pushed out of the system and left to assume their services are no longer needed.
“Looks like I’m out of work. You were just logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack,” one wrote.
Twitter has also shut down all employees – whether laid off or not – from its offices.
“To help ensure the safety of every employee as well as Twitter’s systems and customer data,” one notice read, “Our offices will be temporarily closed and access to all badges will be suspended.”
Employees in New York and California and the company’s headquarters in Dublin, Ireland were affected.
According to former member Joan Deitchman, the seemingly important Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team lost about 20 people, the total number of employees.
“Yes, the team is gone,” she wrote last night. “The team that has been researching and pushing towards algorithm transparency and algorithm selection. The team that has been studying computational amplification. The team that has been inventing and building ethical tools and methodologies for artificial intelligence. All of this is gone.”
Among those laid off are the company’s global head of social and editorial affairs and his 17-person team, Twitter’s global head of culture and community and head of creator content in the United States. Additional departments affected include community, learning design, entertainment partnerships, engineering, iOS development, global wellness, and global conversations.
See a selection of employee announcements and comments below.
