Twitter is facing a class action lawsuit from former employees who say they were not given enough notice under US federal law that they had lost their jobs, finding out they had been let go when they were locked out of their work accounts on Thursday. In a company-wide memo, staff were informed on Thursday that they would receive an email to their personal email accounts if they were being fired as part of the mass sackings at the platform in which up to half of the company could go.
Before those emails arrived, dozens of staff began posting on Twitter that they had been fired – after discovering they were no longer able to access their work email accounts or log into their work laptops. Musk’s plans to cut up to 3,700 staff may hit a roadblock, however, after a lawsuit was filed in the US federal court in San Francisco seeking orders for Twitter to comply with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires 60 days’ notice for mass sackings at large employers.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of five Twitter employees so far, says one was fired on 1 November, while three were not informed at the time of filing but had been locked out of their email accounts. The case cited a similar situation with sackings at Musk’s other company, Tesla, where the company sought to obtain full release from its obligations under the Warn Act by offering severance of one or two weeks’ pay instead.
