Twitter is reaching out to some employees to come back after it engaged in a mass layoff last week, according to multiple reports. The company’s new owner Elon Musk laid off 3,700 people from Twitter — almost half of its staff — after he completed the takeover.
A Bloomberg report cited sources saying that the company asked some folks to return as they were laid off “by mistake.” It also noted it was calling some other employees back as they were critical for building features for the platform Musk envisions.
In addition to this, several posts on the anonymous app Blind also indicated that Twitter might have called a few employees back. Casey Newton also reported in a thread that on internal Slack, remaining employees were asked to make a list of potential candidates that could be called back.
The company had dismissed people across multiple departments, including human rights, accessibility, machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability, advertising, marketing, communications, engineering and curation. So it is not surprising that it realized some of those folks might be critical to keep the platform running smoothly and working on new features.
Within weeks of taking over the company, Musk has promised a bunch of new features like revamped verification process and a new Twitter Blue experience priced at $8. The Tesla CEO has also set very tight deadlines for these feature rollouts. With a ton of people laid off across functions, it might be tough for the remaining employees to get things done in time.
Musk and his team have promised to build things like attaching long-form text to tweets and a new version of TweetDeck. According to tweets from a former employee, multiple people from these teams who were working on these features were fired. What’s more, the new Twitter CEO also promised to build a paywall feature with a set of publishers days after it ended a similar program that was part of the Twitter Blue subscription.
Last week, a bunch of former Twitter employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company for not giving them adequate notice before dismissing them from their jobs. The case alleged Twitter of violating worker protection laws like the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act — both require 60 days of advance notice before a mass layoff.
Job cuts haven’t been the only chaotic thing at Twitter after the Musk takeover. The product rollout has also been a mess. Over the weekend, several folks received notifications on their iOS device that the company is rolling out the blue checkmark to people who are ready to pay $7.99 a month. However, Esther Crawford, a product lead at Twitter, clarified that these notifications were just a part of a test. Over the weekend, Twitter reportedly shelved the plan of rolling out the new verification system until after Tuesday’s midterms elections in the U.S.
Twitter didn’t comment on the story, but maybe because the whole communication staff was laid off.
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