Shiraz, the social lead for Twitter Gaming, revealed that he was among those laid off from the social media giant. The layoffs are happening across Twitter’s staff across the world, which is said to affect about 3,700 of its 7,500 employees.
“I always tried to champion Creators and Gaming internally to the best of my ability no matter how small or big you were,” wrote Shiraz days before the layoffs.
“Y’all were on a level footing to me and I did my best to treat y’all as such I’ve been at Twitter 9 1/2 years so if it’s my time, it is what it is.”
Musk bought the social media site on October 27 for $44 billion. Bloomberg initially reported the mass Twitter layoffs earlier in the week as part of Musk’s larger effort to cut costs across the company.
On Twitter, staff have been notified of their job status either via email to either their work or personal accounts.
Beyond greatly reducing Twitter’s staff, Musk also plans on including Twitter verification into Twitter Blue, the website’s monthly subscription service.
For better or worse, Twitter is about to change
As layoffs across Twitter’s staff continue, now former employees have filed a class action lawsuit against their ex-employer. The workers behind the suit say the company violated federal and California law by failing to provide sufficient notice about the layoffs.
Per the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), large companies cannot conduct mass layoffs without at least 60 days (or two months) of advance notice.
California has a WARN Act of its own, which has the same requirements.
However, Shiraz pointed out that he was technically given notice, which is a potential loophole that may complicate the lawsuit against Twitter.
“We’re still employed past the WARN date,” he acknowledged, “just no access/not required to work.”