Twitter lays off nearly 50% of its workforce days after Musk’s ownership and asks some to come back

Elon Musk has layed off nearly half of Twitter's entire workforce on Friday including those from the teams which are responsible to keep twitter's platform safe from misinformation ahead of the US midterms.

Other teams impacted by the massive layoffs are policy, product trust and safety, tweet curation, communications, ethical AI, research, data, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and a few teams from engineering.

The massive layoff comes after Elon Musk fired Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, and Twitter's CFO. Many other top level executives have been layed off from the company and some have resigned from their positions.

Some employees at the company claim that the layoffs and lack of employees at the company means that Twitter will have many problems in the future with their infrastructure and how they operate. They expect the platform to have many glitches as well as have frequent outages.

The emails notifying employees about their employment status at the company went out at 9am Pacific Time on Friday with employees who were layed off being notified via their personal email while employees who weren't layed off, being notified via their work email. Many employees who were layed off immediately lost all access to their work account and login to Twitter's servers along with some being locked out the night before.

Twitter also kept their offices closed on Friday with badge access shut off at Birdhouse. Twitter employees were notified that badge access will remain shut off until Monday November 7th.

Twitter also asked some of the layed off employees to return back to Twitter after realizing they might have layed them off by mistake and will require their skills for Musk's vision for Twitter.

Musk claims his massive layoff was necessary to keep Twitter profitable since the company is known to be unprofitable and most of its revenue comes from ads.

This comes at a time when most tech giants in Silicon Valley are reducing their workforce and or freezing recruitment of new employees. Companies like Lyft, Upstart, and Meta have also been reducing their workforce to stay profitable.

Musk has been called out by many government officials saying the company must announce massive layoffs 60 days prior to doing so and that Musk has broken many federal laws and California state laws. Many Twitter employees have even sued the company for the massive reduction in headcount.