Employees at Elon Musk’s Twitter brace for layoffs

NEW YORK — Employees braced for widespread layoffs at Twitter Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the social platform.

The company sent a letter to employees, which was obtained by multiple media outlets. It stated that employees would be notified by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time of if they were laid off. The email did not specify how many people would be laid off.

Several employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts.

Twitter’s roughly 7,500 employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm of the company. On his first day as CEO of Tesla, Parag Agrawal, a billionaire, has already fired top executives.

He also resigned from the company’s board and appointed himself the sole member of the board. Many Twitter employees took to Twitter on Thursday night to show support for one another. They often tweeted blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo and saluted each other with emojis.

As of Thursday, Musk had not made public any announcements about the upcoming layoffs. This is despite the fact that the federal Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification statute requires employers who employ at least 100 workers, to notify layoffs involving 500 employees. It doesn’t matter if a company has a public or private stock.

Barry C. White spoke for California’s Employment Development Department and said that they have not received any recent notifications from Twitter.

The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Meta Platforms Inc. is Facebook’s parent company. It recently reported its second quarter revenue decline in history, and its shares are at their lowest level since 2015.. Meta’s disappointing results were due to weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet, and even Microsoft.