Twitter’s cost-cutting has continued as the company fired contractors without notice Saturday, according to media reports.
The newest round of cuts involved eliminating somewhere between 4,400 to 5,500 contract employees, Platformer’s Casey Newton reported Sunday, “with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.”
Like the company’s massive layoffs, which impacted approximately 50% of staffers, contractors were clued into the termination not by a formal notice but instead after realizing they had lost access to company systems, including their email Slack accounts, among others, according to Newton, as well as reports from Axios and CNBC.
CNBC claims that employees who worked alongside the contracted staffers weren’t notified by their termination. This is according to multiple sources who chose not to identify themselves. The publication also reported that Twitter terminated its entire communications team, its sources said, as the staffers joked that media outlets reporting on the company’s movements are serving as an internal communications department.
Following the staff-wide layoffs, Axios also reported that contractors have expressed concern about receiving paychecks for their work since full-time staffers who would sign off on their time cards were removed from their teams and the company.
Twitter did not immediately respond to ’s request for comment.
According to an internal email obtained from the company, full-time employees would be notified if they were affected in the first round. This was to happen by Friday Nov. 4, 9 a.m.PT.Reuters. Many employees were alerted to their imminent layoffs while they were still logged into their computer at work, their email and their Slack accounts late Thursday evening.
