After firing about 50 per cent of Twitter workforce, or about 3,800 employees, Elon Musk has reportedly laid off at least 4,400 contractual workers at the company.
According to reports from Platformer and Axios, the micro-blogging platform is now laying off employees who are on contract. "Contractors aren't being notified at all, they're just losing access to Slack and email. Managers figured it out when their workers just disappeared from the system," tweeted Platformer's Casey Newton.
"They heard nothing from their leaders," he posted.
Neither Musk nor Twitter reacted to the new wave of layoffs that started over the weekend.
Many found out they weren't working for the company anymore after they abruptly lost access to Twitter's internal systems.
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"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager posted in the company's internal Slack messaging platform.
Following Twitter's earlier layoffs, many contractors ended up on teams with no full-time staff, leaving no one to sign off on their timesheets, Engadget reported.
Meanwhile, Musk said he’s overworked. According to news agency Bloomberg, Musk on Monday said, “I have too much work on my plate, that’s for sure.”
Musk, who was responding to questions during a session at the B20 in Indonesia, a business conference running alongside the G20 meeting in Bali this week, said, “I’m working the absolute most that I can work — morning to night, seven days a week.”
The world’s richest man said, “The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.”
The newly installed ‘Chief Twit’ of Twitter Inc. beamed into the conference through a video link. The comments come as Musk brings his unique brand of management to the social media platform, firing close to 3,700 employees just over a week ago.
Musk since backtracked on some of those dismissals, but has also scrapped the company’s work-from-home (WFH) policies. Musk’s opposition to remote work is well-documented, with staff at Tesla Inc. told to “pretend to work elsewhere” if they wanted to work from home. He’s also been known to sleep at work, or even on the factory floor.
According to the report, how much Musk works was the most consistent theme of Monday’s at-times-stilted conversation at the B20. It was made even more surreal by Musk’s darkened background and dim lighting. The billionaire, dressed in an Indonesian batik-print shirt sent to him by the organisers, said the power was cut off in his location, which wasn’t disclosed.
(With inputs from IANS)