Twitter employees waiting to hear whether they still have a job will be told their fate by email on Friday, following a week of uncertainty about the company's future under new owner Elon Musk.
The social media company said in an email to staff that it will alert employees by 9am Pacific time about staff cuts.
"In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday," the email, seen by Reuters, said.
Mr Musk, who took over last week, has not addressed the staff or laid out his plans for the future of the company, leaving workers to study message boards, news reports and tweets by Mr Musk and his advisers for clues about their fate, multiple employees said.
Managers have been forbidden from calling team meetings or communicating directly with staff, one senior Twitter employee said, adding that they were being monitored.
"It feels like we're working among the Gestapo," they said.
Offices to temporarily close
Twitter said its offices would temporarily close and all badge access would be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
The social media platform said employees not affected by the lay-offs would be notified via their work email addresses.
Staff who have been laid off will be notified with next steps to their personal email addresses, the memo said.
The notification of lay-offs caps off a week of purges by Mr Musk as he demanded deep cost cuts and imposed an aggressive new work ethic across the social media company.
He had already cleared out the company's senior ranks, firing its chief executive and top finance and legal executives.
Others, including those leading the company's advertising, marketing and human resources divisions, departed throughout the past week.
Employees have largely stopped posting on internal Slack channels for fear of reprisal from new bosses, with many instead taking to venting in encrypted messaging apps and the dedicated Twitter company channel on the app Blind, which provides a space for employees to share information anonymously.
"I'm really worried, tweeps," a Twitter staffer wrote on Thursday on Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses. Twitter colleagues often refer to each other as "tweeps."
Lay-offs chill Twitter culture
The lay-offs, which were long expected, have chilled Twitter's famously open corporate culture that has been revered by its employees.
Shortly after the email landed in Twitter employee inboxes, hundreds of people flooded the company's Slack channels to say goodbye, two employees told Reuters. Someone invited Mr Musk to join the channel, the sources said.
"If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home," Twitter said in the email on Thursday.
Mr Musk has also directed Twitter's teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters.
Waiting for the axe
Some Twitter employees have stopped taking calls or responding to emails from clients hounding them for information, because they did not know if they still had jobs, one employee told Reuters.
Others raced to meet deadlines by Friday local time, when they expected the axe to fall, another employee said. One manager tweeted a photo of herself sleeping on the floor of the office in a silver sleeping bag.
While some worried about annual bonuses or how they would be notified of lay-offs, others rushed to apply for jobs at other companies.
International employees fretted about the status of their visas.
One employee sought advice on Blind about whether it was worth mentioning Twitter on their resume.
Employees who spoke with Reuters said they are learning about changes at their company by observing their work calendars and screenshots of discussion from managers, not from official communication from Mr Musk or other leaders.
One employee confirmed that "days of rest," which are highly popular company-wide days off, have been removed from calendars for the rest of the year.
"Give us the details," a Google employee wrote in a Blind post directed at Twitter staff.
"It's worse than everything you're reading. Much worse," answered a Twitter employee.
Reuters/ABC
