Elon Musk’s Twitter calls back some of the fired employees, says they got laid off ‘by mistake’

Just two days after laying off almost 50 per cent of its staff, Elon Musk’s Twitter Inc has now apparently reached out to dozens of the fired people asking them to return to jobs, reports Bloomberg.

As per the report published on Sunday, some of those being asked to come back were laid off “by mistake”. Citing people in the know the report further says that others have been asked to rejoin after the management realised that in order to build new features that have been envisioned by the Tesla CEO these people are necessary.

Watch | Elon Musk to introduce a new feature on Twitter, UN urges CEO to ensure respect of human rights

This comes as the company fired 50 per cent of its employees, including laying off the entire human rights team and “all but two of the ethical AI team”, a move that UN human rights chief Volker Turk in an open letter said was not an “encouraging start”.  

Reuters reports that tweets by the social media company’s employees also revealed that people from product and engineering departments, as well as teams in charge of communications, content curation, human rights, and machine learning ethics, had been terminated.

Also read | Amid mass Twitter layoffs, UN urges Elon Musk to ‘ensure human rights are central’ to company’s management

Following Musk’s acquisition, Twitter fired close to 3,700 staff this week through email in an effort to reduce costs. 

Musk in a tweet said that the “reduction in force” was due to the high losses his newly purchased company is experiencing. “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” he wrote.

Also read | Twitter’s new iOS update lets users get the blue verification mark ‘just like the celebrities’ for $7.99

He also claimed that the fired employees received a severance “50% more than legally required”, however, as per Bloomberg, many employees found out they were fired only after their access to company-wide systems, such as email and Slack, was abruptly suspended. 

(With inputs from agencies)

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