An avalanche of Twitter employees shared their emotional goodbyes as Elon Musk brutally cut swathes of staff members, giving them just a few hours notice.
Using #OneTeam hundreds of now former employees shared the grim news that they had been made redundant by the social media platform’s new boss.
The popular social media site has hit the headlines recently after Musk, the world's richest man with net worth estimated between $221.5-$254billion, took over in a $44billion swoop.
However, soon after his takeover the South African born billionaire businessman began talking about how the company needed to become more profitable.
This involved policies like charging for the verified status of a blue tick, and also reports emerged that mass-redundancies were imminent.
The sweeping job cuts began today, but workers in America have filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter in San Francisco saying the lack of notice violated federal and state law.
An internal memo shared around Twitter reportedly said: “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.
“We recognise that this will impact 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.”
Employees were told late on Thursday, via email, that they would be contacted Friday to be told if they still had a job.
The cutthroat fashion was compared to the ‘Red Wedding’ - an infamously bloody scene on Game of Thrones - by one Twitter executive.
As soon as this email went out, internally, staff began posting farewells and flooded the slack channels with so many messages, on one occasion they broke the platform temporarily.
The ‘salute’ emoji came to encompass the pride many of the employees carried for their work and colleagues and they used it to sign off as more and more found their accounts deactivated and emails blocked.
That, alongside the #OneTeam, documented the stories of thousands saying goodbye publicly.
In many instances, staff would know if they had a job by where they received the email Friday morning.
If they received it in their work email, they still had a job, if they received it in their personal email, they were unemployed as of this morning.
However, some found out when they simply couldn’t log on or access their emails this morning.
Twitter is expected to cut around half of its staff - around 3,700 people.
In the UK, some Twitter staff woke up unable to log into their accounts, the first sign they had lost their jobs.
One former employee tweeted: “Well this isn’t looking promising. Can’t log onto emails. Mac won’t turn on.
“But so grateful this is happening at 3am. Really appreciate the thoughtfulness of the timing front guys.
“Meanwhile to everyone else at Twitter, you’re the best #OneTeam”.
Another echoed the sudden shock the news had been delivered, and pride with which they held their work: “Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack. #OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much. So sad it had to end this way”.
A third worked was let go so abruptly they hadn’t had time to inform their team about some last minute work they had done.
They tweeted: “Heya I just lost access to all my Twitter logins so I guess that's it :(
“If you're still an iOS dev at Twitter check out D1011300 I landed TODAY which finishes a debugging assist tool I quickly finished this week for the iOS developers left <3 last little gift <3 #oneteam”.
Others, who had worked across increasingly crucial divisions like misinformation, left on a darker note, warning of the impact the new owner would have.
They tweeted: “I feel sorry for anyone that didn’t get fired tbh. Elon will run those left into the ground with his hair-brained ideas. Any kind of Twitter we knew before is dead.”
As employees learned last night that they might be jobless by the morning, Elon Musk tweeted 'Why is small talk even legal?!'
Twitter was approached for comment.
