Twitter Lays Off 8% of Staff - and This Is How Some Found Out

It may not have been elegant, or sensitive, but it sure was efficient. And the stock price went up 5% so it's all good, right?

To be fair - as if anyone who isnt a sucker cares about that - Twitter may have only used this method with employees who worked remotely and who didnt respond to a phone call from HR.

But, to be even fairer, HR did not wait around to actually talk to the individual because... time is money? you don't want them sabotaging the system before their access is denied? or because this is one of the ways of demonstrating how technology brings people closer together?

Interestingly, most of the layoffs were apparently to engineering staff, as opposed say, to marketers, sales people, executives. Which does raise questions about the future of the service as a stand-alone entity. JL

Kia Kokalitcheva reports in Fortune:

Some employees found out because they no longer had access to their work email accounts and other work tools like GitHub when they woke up.

It’s wasn’t the most graceful.

News broke out last week that Twitter, finally with a permanent CEO, would be making cuts this week, but no one expected the clumsy approach the company took.
On Tuesday, Twitter cut 336 employees, or about 8% of its workforce, and some employees found out because they no longer had access to their work email accounts
and other work tools like GitHub when they woke up, according to tweets and posts in online forum Reddit. It’s not entirely clear if this happened only to employees who work from home or remotely, however.
We’ve reached out to Twitter TWTR -0.38% for comment on how it proceeded with the layoffs and whether this was widely implemented.
After the company officially appointed co-founder Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO, significant company changes were expected. Over the years, investors have argued that Twitter’s workforce has grown too big in the face of flat user growth and only modest increases in revenue. Twitter is also expected to reshuffle its engineering organization, presumably in the hopes of boosting its product development, which hasn’t been the most effective in recent years.