Twitter lays off 5K contractors in surprise 2nd wave of cuts, more mods lost
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Twitter already faces a class-action lawsuit from some staff that the company laid off without providing federally required notice. Now, rather than realize the error of its ways, Twitter decided this weekend that its next round of layoffs should come with no notice at all.
On Saturday, Platformer's Casey Newton tweeted that a large number of Twitter contract workers based inside and outside the US had been laid off. This decision was seemingly made so abruptly that not even the contractors' managers were told they'd be losing workers. Business Insider published the email sent out to contract workers, coldly informing them that Monday would be their last day and no work was required of them that day. The Verge estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 workers were affected from content moderation, marketing, engineering, and other teams. By some estimates, this represents 80 percent of all Twitter contract workers.
"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager wrote in Slack, according to Newton's tweet thread.