Twitter after Musk takeover: Mass layoffs, class action lawsuit, server savings, drop in sales

Elon Musk had made no secret of wanting to terminate Twitter employees in the event of a takeover. Various news portals are now reporting completion. Layoffs appear to be far greater than observers had hoped. A good half of the workforce is affected, according to employee circles.

According to Yoel Roth, who heads the security and integrity department at Twitter, 15 percent of his department has been laid off. In the entire company, it should be 50 percent of all colleagues. Corresponding figures were already circulating in the rumor mill a few hours beforehand. Accordingly, 3,700 of the approximately 7,500 jobs will be lost. The PR team of the short message service had been thinned out. Two people are to take over here in the future, for which 80 to 100 employees were previously responsible.

Twitter after Musk takeover: Employees face class action lawsuit over layoffs and server savings

Five employees filed a class action lawsuit immediately after their dismissal. Your allegation: Contrary to what is required by US law in the state of California, you were not informed of your dismissal 60 days in advance. The resentment in the workforce is huge, but advertisers should also break away from Twitter in rows. Even before the wave of layoffs, General Motors had stopped advertising on Twitter, recently followed by Volkswagen and United Airlines, among others.

Also interesting: Twitter: Elon Musk wants to monetize the blue tick

Meanwhile, Reuters, citing internal sources, reports that Twitter is losing $3 million a day. To compensate for this loss, the company wants to reduce spending on server and cloud infrastructure, according to the report. This should save 1.5 to 3 million dollars a day. Critics fear that Twitter’s website and mobile app will run with insufficient capacity to cushion political events, for example. An enormous increase in traffic is expected before the US midterm elections on November 8, 2022 – until then, however, all servers could still be in operation.

In Germany, journalists and politicians in particular seem to be turning their backs on the platform, including SPD leader Saskia Esken. Esken commented on this in a guest post Zeit.de details of their withdrawal. In it, she warns of hate, hate speech and disinformation and accuses the Twitter operators of being negligent in connection with fake profiles and reported criminal content such as insults or hate speech. She also complains that the digital sphere is controlled by a few companies and their commercial interests.

The withdrawal of Twitter is also being criticized online. Apostates, for example, have to put up with the accusation in order to fear their sovereignty of interpretation should Elon Musk push through his American understanding of freedom of expression. Musk himself is actually considered to be quite opinionated, but the multi-billionaire also promised, among other things, to take action against fake accounts.

Source: daily News, Reuters