After sacking 50% workforce, Elon Musk’s Twitter lays off over 4,400 contractual workers: Report

After sacking about 50% of Twitter workforce, Elon Musk has reportedly laid off at least 4,400 contractual workers at the social media company. “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,” tweeted Platformer's Casey Newton.

A week after Elon Musk's takeover, on 4 November, Twitter fired around 3,700 people via email as a way to cut costs. Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended.

After laying off around half the company, Twitter Inc has now taken a U-turn and is asking dozen of employees who lost their jobs, to come back, according to the news agency Bloomberg.

"Some of those who are being asked to return was laid off by mistake. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build new features Musk envisions," said people familiar with the moves, asking not to be identified discussing private information.

Meanwhile,  Elon Musk, in his first address to Twitter Inc. employees since purchasing the company for $44 billion, said that bankruptcy was a possibility if it doesn’t start generating more cash, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The warning came amid a tumultuous start to Musk’s reign at the social media company -- a two-week period in which he has fired half of Twitter’s staff, ushered out most of the top executives and ordered the remaining employees to stop working from home. Two executives who until today had emerged as part of Musk’s new leadership team, Yoel Roth and Robin Wheeler, are also on the way out, people familiar with the situation said.