Elon Musk-led Twitter fires 4,400 contract workers without informing them: Report

By Team Newsable  |  First Published Nov 14, 2022, 12:45 PM IST

Last week, Elon Musk fired 50 per cent of Twitter's staff, which is somewhere around 3500. A recent report suggests Musk fired thousands of more employees over the weekend.  Twitter hasn’t officially revealed any details related to the recent round of layoffs yet.


Elon Musk has been under fire since he acquired Twitter in a massive $44 billion deal. The tech entrepreneur has drawn criticism for the most recent updates to the microblogging site as well as for firing over 50% of the whole staff, which comprises roughly 3,800 workers. According to recent claims from Platformer and Axios, it now seems that the layoff wasn't sufficient as Musk has reportedly fired at least 4,400 contract employees.

According to Casey Newton of Platformer's tweet "Contractors are just losing access to Slack and email; there is no notification at all. When their employees abruptly vanished from the system, managers realised something was wrong."

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Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.

People inside are stunned.

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton)

He stated in a tweet, "They heard nothing from their leaders. As of right moment, neither Twitter nor Musk have made any comments about the recent round of mass layoffs that began over the weekend. Many contract employees unexpectedly lost access to Twitter's internal systems, just like the previous round of layoffs, and discovered they were no longer employed by the firm."

A manager wrote via the organization's internal Slack messaging system, "One of my contractors just was deactivated without warning in the middle of implementing crucial improvements to our kid safety protocols."

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Questions on the current round of layoffs that began over the weekend have received no response from either Musk or Twitter. Many discovered they were no longer employed by the firm when they suddenly lost access to Twitter's internal systems.

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