Twitter is about to enter its second week of full-time work under the leadership of Elon Musk with half its employees. However, the week is expected to be full of challenges for Musk as he will have to deal with many top advertisers who have suspended their campaigns, a mounting loss and the need to backtrack his earlier decisions.
The social media giant fired nearly 3,700 employees on Friday, and then shortly reached out to a number of fired employees that it later determined either had been fired due to error or are critical to changes that the billionaire businessman wishes to implement.
One of Musk’s primary initial goals – launch Twitter Blue Subscription for $8/month – was delayed until Wednesday in order to avoid any chaos in the US midterm elections.
The whiplash incidents, according to people who have been in the know and in an internal memo published on Slack, follow Musk’s acknowledgement in a tweet that the company he acquired for $44 billion is losing $4 million a day.
In an aggressive move, Twitter reduced its staff to half as an attempt to cut expenses following the Musk acquisition that was completed in October last week. Many employees learned they lost their jobs after their access to the company’s systems, like Slack and email, was abruptly suspended.
The company’s decision to reinitiate some of the fired employees demonstrates how hush-hush and chaotic the procedure was.
Certain regions were hit more in comparison to other regions. The company laid off over 90% of its workforce in India over the weekend, causing a massive reduction in its product and engineering staff. The company was left with a dozen of employees in the market to manage the whole show in India, according to them.
Meta Platforms, which is also having trouble limiting costs after spending a lot of money on its metaverse project, could be announcing large-scale job cuts this week, according to the Wall Street Journal citing unidentified sources. There are plans to lay off thousands of employees working for Facebook, and the decision could be announced in a day or two, according to the newspaper.
Twitter has let go of more than 3,700 employees and an almost equal number of employees that are left are now responsible to manage the whole show globally. Musk has been urging employees who are still employed by Twitter to accelerate the release process of new features. The level of pressure could be understood from the fact that, in some instances, employees have even been sleeping in the office in order to meet the aggressive deadlines set by Musk.
Twitter has confirmed that it will be of course introducing new capabilities for the Twitter Blue subscription plan, with a verification checkmark for anyone who pays the monthly cost. The subscription plan will also offer users seeing fewer ads, the capability to upload longer videos and receive prioritization in mentions, replies and searches.
Twitter will be releasing the brand new blue verification mark for users who pay $7.99 per month for the service beginning on November 9th according to an internal message from the company that was shared on Slack. The company had earlier planned to release the subscription feature on the 7th of November the day prior to the presidential election.
“Widespread verification will make journalism more accessible and help empower the people’s voice,” Musk said in a tweet.
The company received both internal and external feedback suggesting that the verification process used for the Twitter Blue programme could be susceptible to misuse. This raised the possibility that politicians and other political leaders could be impersonated on the network until election day in the US.
On Sunday night, Musk said Twitter would block accounts that pretend to be other people after a number of prominent users changed their names and profile pictures to impersonate the billionaire. Any name change may also result in the temporary suspension of the blue verification mark.
