WASHINGTON: Fear and dread spread across Twitter Inc offices on Thursday as 7,500 employees from San Francisco to Singapore feared for job cuts that were planned to hit about half of the staff, according to current and former employees and message board posts shared with Reuters.
Twitter will tell employees by email on Friday (today) about whether they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and preventing staff access, following a week of uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk.
Since billionaire Elon Musk took over last week, he has kept employees in the dark. He has not addressed the staff or laid out his plans for the future of the company, leaving workers to study message boards, news reports and tweets by Musk and his advisers for clues about their fate, multiple employees said.
Managers have been forbidden from calling team meetings or communicating directly with staff, one senior Twitter employee said, adding that they were being monitored.
“It feels like we’re working among the Gestapo,” they said.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Employees have largely stopped posting on internal Slack channels for fear of reprisal from new bosses, with many instead taking to venting in encrypted messaging apps and the dedicated Twitter company channel on the app Blind, which provides a space for employees to share information anonymously.
“I’m really worried tweeps,” a Twitter staffer wrote Thursday on Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses. Twitter colleagues often refer to each other as “tweeps.”
The comment only scratched the surface of the dark and apprehensive mood inside the social media company now controlled by the Tesla Inc chief executive. Employees are waiting to hear if they will still have jobs on Friday, when layoffs are expected to begin, according to speculation among employees.
