Widespread Twitter layoffs begin a week after Musk takeover

Twitter began widespread layoffs Friday as owner Elon Musk overhauls the company, raising grave concerns about chaos enveloping the platform as a source of reliable information just days ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

The speed and size of the cuts also opened Musk and Twitter to lawsuits. One was filed Thursday in San Francisco alleging that Twitter intends to lay off more workers and has violated federal law by not providing the required notice. The company had told employees by email that they would find out by 9 a.m. PDT (noon EDT) if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many of the roughly 7,500 employees would lose their jobs.

Musk didn’t confirm or correct investor Ron Baron at a conference in New York on Friday when he asked the billionaire 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 activists who urged big companies to halt advertising on the platform. Musk hasn’t commented on the layoffs.

“The activist groups have been successful in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue, and we’ve done our absolute best to appease them and nothing is working,” he said.

Some employees of the San Francisco-based company tweeted earlier that they had already lost access to their work accounts. They and others tweeted messages of support using the hashtag #OneTeam.

A civic integrity team manager at Twitter who quit in September, Eddie Perez, said he fears the layoffs so close to the midterms could allow disinformation to “spread like wildfire” during the post-election vote-counting period.

“I have a hard time believing that it doesn’t have a material impact on their ability to manage the amount of disinformation out there,” he said.

Perez, a board member at the nonpartisan election integrity nonprofit OSET Institute, said the post-election period is particularly perilous because “some candidates may not concede and some may allege election irregularities and that is likely to generate a new cycle of falsehoods.”

Twitter’s employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm. Already, he has fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as owner.

Musk also had removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member.