Twitter Fires 80% of Contractor Employees With No Formal Notice

There are reports that approximately 4,400 contract employees out of 5,500 were laid off by Twitter.

Some employees had no idea until they read about it on Twitter.

The first report was tweeted by Casey Newton, journalist with Platformer and host of a NYTimes podcast.

He tweeted.

“Getting word that a large number of number of Twitter contractors were just laid off this afternoon with no notice, both in the US and abroad. Functions affected appear to include content moderation, real estate, and marketing, among others”

A Twitter data scientist responded that this has just happened to them:

This just happened to me. I work(ed) in content moderation in political misinformation.

— Melissa Ingle (@mingle74) November 13, 2022

Additionally he tweeted that contractors received no notice, similar to some of the regular employees who only found out they were fired after discovering they had lost access to company emails and Slack channels.

Casey tweeted an update:

“Contractors aren’t being notified at all, they’re just losing access to Slack and email. Managers figured it out when their workers just disappeared from the system.

They heard nothing from their leaders”

He followed up with:

“One manager just posted in Slack:”one of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows”

Working to learn more, email me for my Signal.”

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A fired contractor messaged Casey to confirm the poor treatment given to the fired contractors.

Casey posted a screenshot of the message from a fired Twitter contractor:

“I’m a contractor you’re reporting is accurate. I just learned I was laid off by reading your tweets and then trying to log in on slack and email and realized i was all gone.”

Casey followed up on Sunday with a tweet that offered a picture of the scale of the firings, indicating that approximately 80% of the contractor workforce was fired.

Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.

People inside are stunned.

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 13, 2022

“Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.

People inside are stunned.”

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People outside of Twitter were stunned as well, with some tweeting surprise that the Twitter could still function with so many employees and contractors fired in the past week.

How is this site still working?

— Nazish Munch (@NazishMunch) November 13, 2022

The timing of a layoff is especially bad for working parents, especially as the holidays come around.

I mean honestly I think you’re right. I don’t have much savings but I will be okay. It’s just going to be very tight for awhile and I honestly wish it hadn’t happened around the holidays. I have two kids ane am a single parent so it will be tight.

— Melissa Ingle (@mingle74) November 14, 2022