Some staff who lost their jobs at Twitter’s Dublin office on Friday said others should consider resigning to send a message of solidarity to their former colleagues and the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
“It’s just bizarre. I honestly don’t know how to feel. I knew it was going to be a big day after the news during the week, but you still don’t feel prepared for this,” one former staff member told The Irish Times.
The manner in which staff were let go, was “messed up,” he said. “It didn’t really sink in when the email came through. I don’t think it has sinked in yet at all.”
Twitter laid off around 50 per cent of its global workforce on Friday – a figure that Mr Musk and others have not disputed, amounting to an estimated 3,700 people.
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Staff who lost their jobs in Ireland found their workplace access had been cut off on Friday morning as Mr Musk began cuts to the company’s global workforce. Employees being laid off were disconnected from the company’s email and other internal systems, with badge access also suspended. The company’s offices temporarily closed.
“People who got let go can’t even access our inbox. We’re just locked out from everything. I think people should resign, to be honest, to show [Musk] that the way this is being handled is a mistake,” another former staff member at the Dublin office told The Irish Times.
One woman at Twitter’s Dublin office, who was not affected by the lay-offs on Friday, said: “The question for those of us who are still there now is whether we even want to stay. It’s a good job, and we have good colleagues, but who wants to work for a company who has just done this?
“It could have just as easily been us. Some of it seems kind of random. We don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few weeks or months,” she said.
The social media platform said Twitter employees who are not affected by the lay-offs will be notified via their work email addresses, while those affected would be informed of next steps via their personal email.
The lay-offs among Twitter’s 7,500-strong workforce are a dramatic cost-cutting cull that comes a week after billionaire Mr Musk closed his $44 billion (€45 billion) buyout of the social media company.
Twitter, which established its European headquarters in Ireland in 2011, employs around 500 people at its Cumberland Place office in Dublin.
More than 50 per cent of Irish-based staff are expected to be affected by the cuts.
About the mass layoffs, Mr Musk said in a tweet: “There is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day”.
Twitter has, however, also experienced a massive revenue drop due to advertisers’ pulling back in the wake of the chaos of Mr Musk’s layoffs and tweets of potential policy changes in recent days.
Twitter is also already facing a legal action in the United States surrounding its handling of layoffs. Former employees allege they were not given proper notice under US federal law.
Mr Musk has claimed in a tweet that every Twitter employee laid off was offered three months of severance.
But the New York Times, citing laid off employees, reported that terminated workers were “given few details about severance and were told they would receive more information in a week”, adding: “They said they gleaned that any severance would probably be less than what Twitter’s previous management would have paid.”
In another late Friday tweet, Musk also claimed that “Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged”. He further claimed that “we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms”, but Musk did not elaborate or provide specific evidence of that. – additional reporting: Guardian
