Elon Musk. Andrew Kelly/Portal
Dozens of Twitter employees were laid off overnight Wednesday, people familiar with the matter told Insider.
The layoffs, mostly of engineers, came as a surprise on Twitter, people said.
Thousands of Twitter employees have been fired, terminated, or fired since Musk took over.
Elon Musk fired several dozen Twitter employees overnight Wednesday, most of whom were engineers, two people familiar with the company’s actions told Insider.
The layoffs came as a surprise from within Twitter, people said. Musk said in an all-hands meeting earlier this week that there would be no more layoffs at the company.
The employees laid off overnight on Wednesday were informed they were being made redundant for performance reasons and were given a month’s severance pay, one of the people said.
The termination process is similar to that of previously laid-off employees, the two people said: access to work equipment and computers was blocked, and a notice of termination was sent to the affected employees’ personal email accounts.
Thousands of Twitter employees have already been fired, terminated, or fired by Musk, thinning out key employees. Twitter teams were already so understaffed that many employees had to work Thanksgiving, people said.
The layoffs are believed to be due, at least in part, to Musk’s new policy that requires Twitter engineers and other employees working on code or technical projects to update him each week on what they’ve been working on that they were hoping to complete and certain lines of code they wrote, as Insider previously reported. While these updates are usually expected on Fridays, this week they were due on Wednesday because of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Twitter recruiters have reportedly tapped outside engineers to work for Musk’s company, and Musk even hired a con artist who tricked the press into believing he’d just been fired from Twitter. These developments have led employees to believe that Musk has broken his habit of sudden layoffs, one of the people said.
A Musk representative did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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