After firing about 50% of Twitter's workforce, or about 3,800 employees, Elon Musk has reportedly laid off at least 4,400 contractual workers at the company on Monday.
According to reports from Platformer and Axios, the micro-blogging platform is now laying off employees who are on contract.
"Contractors aren't being notified at all, they're just losing access to Slack and email. Managers figured it out when their workers just disappeared from the system," tweeted Platformer's Casey Newton.
"They heard nothing from their leaders," he posted.
Neither Musk nor Twitter reacted to the new wave of layoffs that started over the weekend.
Many found out they weren't working for the company anymore after they abruptly lost access to Twitter's internal systems.
"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager posted in the company's internal Slack messaging platform.
Following Twitter's earlier layoffs, many contractors ended up on teams with no full-time staff, leaving no one to sign off on their timesheets, Engadget reported.
Over the past week, Silicon Valley companies have laid off 20,000 employees, a swift ramp-up of the job cuts and hiring freezes that have been ricocheting through the tech industry for months.
Twitter, Facebook's parent company Meta, payment platform Stripe, software service firm Salesforce, ride-hailing company Lyft and a growing list of smaller companies all laid off double-digit percentages of their workers. That means tens of thousands of engineers, salespeople and support staff in one of the country's most important and highest-paying industries are out of a job. Meanwhile, other companies including Google and Amazon have recently instituted hiring slowdowns and freezes.
The departures are solidifying a feeling in Silicon Valley that the bull market of the past decade - which created massive amounts of wealth for tech investors, workers and the broader economy - is decidedly over, conjuring an image of what the rest of the economy could experience if a predicted recession materializes.
Executives at the companies making the cuts blamed a variety of interconnected factors - overzealous hiring during the pandemic, a slowdown in e-commerce activity and people spending less time online as in-person events return. Tech CEOs have been warning about a looming recession for months, telling their employees to expect tougher working conditions and drastically slowing down the rapid growth they had preached for years.
When it comes to newer tech companies, low interest rates over the past decade have allowed venture capitalists to easily raise money and pour it into new startups - even if their founders didn't have solid plans for actually making money.
During the pandemic, that dynamic went into overdrive. At the same time, bigger tech companies expanded rapidly to take advantage of people spending more time online. Tech share prices soared, boosting confidence and stock-based payouts for workers.
The layoffs come just a year after Silicon Valley was at its peak, with valuations of Big Tech companies spilling into the trillions, salaries at all-time highs and cryptocurrencies pouring new wealth into the pockets of investors and workers alike. Now, tens of thousands of workers are looking for work. Spokespeople for Lyft, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon and Google did not return requests for comment. A spokesperson for Stripe referred to a blog post the company's CEO had made about the layoffs.
Musk said Thursday the company would need to find new sources of revenue or it would not "survive the upcoming economic downturn."
His statement came a day after Zuckerberg said the "macroeconomic downturn" was one of the reasons he needed to fire 11,000 workers, or 13% of Meta's workforce, in the first wide-scale job cuts in its 18-year history.
Stripe is cutting 14% of its staff, real estate marketplace Zillow 5% and ride-hailing app Lyft 13%.
The week's layoffs bring the total number of displaced tech employees in 2022 to just over 120,000, according to Layoffs.fyi, a layoff tracker run by tech founder Roger Lee.
Tech workers who previously could have counted on dozens of offers for their skills will now have to compete for jobs with thousands of other people.
During the pandemic, tech companies grew even faster, as people spent more time online, bought more computers and video game consoles and shifted much of their shopping from in-store retailers to e-commerce. Tech companies took advantage of that shift, investing billions of dollars in hiring new workers and building new data centers to take advantage of what was seen as a once-in-a-lifetime shift. But as pandemic restrictions eased and most people returned to their pre-pandemic habits, the bet that that behavior would be permanently altered fell flat.
The leaders of Facebook and Shopify, which makes tools for merchants to sell online, explicitly blamed their layoffs on overestimating this shift to e-commerce. "This obviously didn't play out the way that I expected or that any of us hoped," Zuckerberg told employees during a call on Wednesday, according to a recording shared with The Washington Post.
