Twitter Inc started a sizeable round of layoffs on Friday, alerting employees of their job status by email after barring entrances to offices and cutting off workers’ access to internal systems overnight.
According to international media, the move follows a week of chaos and uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who tweeted on Friday that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled spending.
Musk did not confirm or correct investor Ron Baron at a Friday conference in New York when he asked the billionaire Tesla CEO how much money he would save after he “fired half of Twitter”.
Musk responded by talking about Twitter’s cost and revenue challenges and blamed a coalition of civil rights groups who urged big companies to halt advertising on the platform. Musk has not commented on the layoffs themselves.
