Twitter temporarily closes offices as Elon Musk begins mass layoffs

Twitter Inc temporarily closed its offices on Friday after telling employees they will be informed by email later in the day whether they are being laid off.

The company’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk is expected to cut around 3,700 jobs, or about half of Twitter’s workforce, as he seeks to slash costs at the social platform he acquired just a week ago for $44 billion (€44.9 billion).

Twitter said in an email that its offices would be temporarily closed and all badge access suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data".

The company said employees who were not affected by the layoffs would be notified via their work email addresses. Staff who had been laid off would be notified with next steps to their personal email addresses.

Some employees tweeted their access to the company's IT system had been blocked and feared whether that suggested they had been laid off.

"Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack," tweeted a user with the account @SBkcrn, whose profile is described as former senior community manager at Twitter.

User Rachel Bonn tweeted: "Last Thursday in the SF (San Francisco) office, really the last day Twitter was Twitter. 8 months pregnant and have a 9-month-old. Just got cut off from laptop access."

An email to Twitter staff reportedly read: “Team, in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.

“We recognise that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward”.

The cuts include