Twitter temporarily closed its offices Friday after telling employees they would be informed by email later in the day about whether they were being laid off.
According to reports the social media platform is expected to fire about 3,700 employees, or about half the workforce, as the company seeks to slash costs and set a new work ethic.
The move follows a week of uncertainty about the company’s future under the leadership of new owner Elon Musk.
Besides shutting down offices, Twitter also cut workers access to internal systems on Friday.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email sent on Thursday.
After the Tesla and SpaceX CEO promised last week to restore free speech while preventing Twitter from descending into a “hellscape”, top advertisers are evaluating their spending on the platform.
Also on Friday Musk tweeted that Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertisers.
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted.
