After a week of uncertainty about the company's future under Elon Musk, Twitter Inc will tell employees by email on Friday if they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and preventing staff access.
The company said in an email to staff that it would alert employees by 9 am Pacific time on Friday 1600 GMT about staff cuts.
The email sent on Thursday, seen by the Reuters, said that in order to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday.
According to internal plans reviewed by Reuters this week, Musk, the world's richest person, is looking to cut around 3,700 Twitter employees, or about half of the workforce.
There was no immediate response from Twitter to a request for comment.
In an email, Twitter said it would be temporarily closed and all badge access suspended to ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data. The company said that 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 their access to the company's IT system had been blocked and they feared that they had been laid off.
A user with the SBkcrn account, whose profile is described as a former senior community manager on Twitter, was 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 stop Twitter from soliciting employees to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.
According to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters, Musk has directed Twitter's teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings.
He had already cleared out 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 departed throughout 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 that were expected have chilled Twitter's famously open corporate culture, which 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.
The hundreds of people who flooded the company's Slack channels after the email arrived in employee inboxes, hundreds of people flooded the company's Slack channels to say goodbye, two employees told Reuters. The sources said that someone invited Musk to join the channel.