Half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were fired this Friday, according to an internal document, as part of the company’s restructuring undertaken by its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, and the Mexico team was one of those affected, as reported through Twitter, all employees of Twitter in Mexico have been terminated.
An email was sent to all company employees late on Thursday notifying them of the job cut plans, informing them that by 9 a.m. Pacific time Friday, workers would receive an email with the subject: “Your role on Twitter”.
Those who kept their jobs would receive a notification in the company email. Those who lost them would be notified through their personal email.
“Team, In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of downsizing our global workforce on Friday,” according to multiple versions of the email obtained by The Washington Post. “We recognize that this will affect a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is, unfortunately, necessary to ensure the company’s future success.”
According to Twitter employees in Mexico, the entire Mexico division was informed of their termination on Friday morning.
In response to the email, dozens of Twitter employees posted a single blue heart to say goodbye to their colleagues. Identical hearts were posted one after another in a long scroll on the company’s Slack.
Some workers had already begun to lose their access to internal systems such as email and the Slack messaging service, and those who were at the company on Thursday described seeing the consequences in real-time.
“Numbers go down in [Slack] channels in the last hour, people are dropping like flies,” said one of them, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Even workers Musk had herded into small teams to speed up new product development over the past six days have been fired, having their access to internal systems revoked. Another employee who spoke under the same condition said he knew four people who had been brought into such a team and who lost their jobs on Thursday.
On Twitter, employees tweeted that they had been cut off from internal systems and assumed they had been fired.
Musk is under pressure to recoup an investment in a site for which he has admitted to overpaying. He took over ownership of Twitter last week after reaching a deal to buy the website for $44 billion this spring, before trying to get out of the buyout and then re-entering the deal as a court battle loomed.
Analysts have estimated the real value of Twitter at about $25 billion dollars. Musk has also borrowed more than $12 billion to finance the purchase of the website, according to financial filings, putting pressure on him to cut costs and remain solvent, faced with paying about $1 billion a year from interest on that debt.
