On Friday, Twitter Inc will tell employees by email whether they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and preventing staff access, following a week of uncertainty about the company's future under new owner Elon Musk.
The social media company said in an email to staff that it would alert employees by 9 am Pacific time on Friday 1600 GMT about staff cuts.
In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday, according to an email sent on Thursday by Reuters.
According to internal plans reviewed by Reuters this week, Musk is looking to cut about 3,700 Twitter employees, or about half of the workforce.
There was no immediate response from Twitter to a request for comment.
In the email, Twitter said that it would be temporarily closed and all badge access suspended in order to ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data. The company said employees who were not affected by the layoffs would be notified via their work email addresses. The memo said that staff who had been laid off would be notified with next steps to their personal email addresses.
Some employees said they had been blocked from access to the company's IT system and they were worried that they had been laid off.
A user with the SBkcrn account, whose profile is described as a former senior community manager on Twitter, has been remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack.
A class action lawsuit was filed on Thursday against Twitter by its employees, who claimed the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60 day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.
The suit also asked the San Francisco federal court to issue an order to prevent Twitter from soliciting employees to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.
Musk has directed Twitter's teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters.
He had already cleared out of the company's senior ranks, firing its chief executive and top finance and legal executives. Others, including those sitting atop the company's advertising, marketing and human resources divisions, have left the company's advertising, marketing and human resources divisions for the past week.
Musk's first week as Twitter's owner has been marked by chaos and uncertainty. Two company-wide meetings were scheduled, but were canceled hours later. Employees told Reuters they were left to piece together information through media reports, private messaging groups and anonymous forums.
The layoffs, which were expected, have chilled Twitter's famously open corporate culture that has been lauded by many of its employees.
If you are in an office or on your way to an office, return home, according to the email on Thursday.
Hundreds of people flooded the company's Slack channels after the email arrived in employee inboxes to say goodbye, two employees told Reuters. The sources said that someone invited Musk to join the channel.