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 and Slack accounts, among others, according to Newton, as well as reports from Axios and CNBC.
According to CNBC, full-time employees who worked with the contracted staffers were also not notified of their termination, according to several sources who chose to go un-named. 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 TheWrap’s request for comment.
In the first round of layoffs, full-time employees were to be notified if they were impacted by the layoffs, by 9 a.m. PT Friday, Nov. 4, according to an internal email obtained by Reuters. However, many staffers learned of their impending layoffs when they were logged out of their work computer, work email and Slack account throughout Thursday evening into the late night.
