Twitter is bracing for layoffs as Elon Musk reportedly plans to cut 5,500 jobs in a move that has some worried about the social media giant's ability to prevent security crises and control harmful content.
Musk told prospective investors that he planned to cut the jobs, amounting to nearly 75% of Twitter's workforce, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Edwin Chen, the company's former head of spam and health metrics, said this extent of cuts was "unimaginable" and would put users at risk of being hacked and exposed to offensive content.
"It would be a cascading effect, where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up," Chen said to the Post, "and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves."
Cuts are expected regardless of Musk's purchasing of Twitter, as the documents also show that its management planned to reduce the payroll by around $800 million, alongside other cuts to Twitter's infrastructure such as the shutting down of data centres.
This was potentially why Twitter was so eager to receive Musk's offer in the first place, and also why it sued him once he tried to back out, eventually resulting in his purchasing of Twitter for $44 million. The deal is expected to close on October 28, and we'll only learn the extent of the cuts (and their impact on Twitter) afterwards.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
Thumbnail image by PATRICK PLEUL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-cutting-5500-jobs-twitter