US-based microblogging platform Twitter<\/a> on Friday fired nearly 180 of its 230-odd employees in India, multiple sources and former employees told ET.
The layoffs were spread across content, partnerships, content curation, sales, and social marketing teams, they said.
“A lot of people just woke up to revoked access,” an employee who was asked to leave on Friday told ET.
India employees started receiving termination notices early in the day, and only a few were sent ‘survivor’ emails, the sources said, referring to a term Twitter India<\/a> staff had coined for workers who have not been laid off.
‘Survivors’ were mostly in teams that work on extremely critical maintenance operations as well as government engagement functions, the sources said.
These employees have been retained “for now” and the social media platform will decide on their roles “soon”, an employee said.
Though Tesla Inc cofounder Elon Musk<\/a>’s takeover of the platform and his subsequent decisions to trim staff including top managers were well known, employees told ET that they had expected “some notice period” before being asked to leave.
“We could have been given some notice. After logging out, people are being told they’re fired. This is not how you do it,” a former Twitter employee who was sacked on Friday said. “Although our US counterparts are saying that we will get 60-days’ severance pay, everyone’s feeling here is that this email (of termination) could have been (done through) a (face-to-face) meeting.”
Another employee who had joined Twitter India two years ago “had not received any email” about being fired but was “logged out of all his company systems, emails and Slack,” the person said.
Slack is an internal messaging platform for offices.
“It is like waking up in the middle of nowhere and not knowing where to go. What does a middle-aged software engineer who got laid off on a Friday do?” another former employee told ET.
Twitter India’s external communications team did not respond to ET's emails seeking comment on the layoffs as of press time Friday.
The terminations at Twitter India are in line with the way employees in other countries have been forced to go.
On Thursday, the new Twitter management sent a global email, informing employees of the mass layoffs.
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