Twitter is contacting some employees to come back after it was massively laid off last week, according to multiple reports. The company’s new owner, Elon Musk, fired 3,700 people from Twitter — nearly half of its workforce — after he completed the acquisition.
A Bloomberg report quoted sources as saying the company had asked some people to return because they had been fired “accidentally”. It also noted that it called back some other employees because they were critical to building features for the platform Musk envisioned.
In addition, several posts on the anonymous app Blind also indicated that Twitter may have called back some employees. Casey Newton also reported in a thread that by internal clearance, the remaining employees were asked to make a list of potential candidates who could be recalled.
The company had laid off people in various departments, including human rights, accessibility, machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability, advertising, marketing, communications, engineering and management. So it’s not surprising that it realized that some of those people could be critical to keeping the platform running smoothly and working on new features.
Within weeks of acquiring the company, Musk has promised a slew of new features, such as a revamped verification process and a new Twitter Blue experience that costs $8. The Tesla CEO has also set very tight deadlines for this feature rollout. With a lot of people laid off in various positions, it can be difficult for the remaining employees to get things done in time.
Last week, a number of former Twitter employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company for failing to give them sufficient notice before firing them from their jobs. The case alleged that Twitter violated worker protection laws such as the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act and the California WARN Act — both requiring 60 days’ notice for mass layoffs.
Job cuts weren’t the only chaotic mess at Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. The product rollout has also been a mess. Over the weekend, several people received notifications on their iOS devices that the company is rolling out the blue check for people willing to pay $7.99 a month. However, Esther Crawford, a product leader at Twitter, clarified that these reports were: only part of a test. Over the weekend, Twitter reportedly shelved its plan to roll out the new verification system until after Tuesday’s US midterm elections.
Twitter didn’t comment on the story, but maybe because the whole communication staff was fired.
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