Some Twitter employees found out they had been laid off on Saturday night when they couldn't login to their company emails or laptops, according to a recent report from The New York Times.
The publication said that the next morning, the Twitter employees who had survived the round of cuts used the secure messaging service Signal to ascertain which employees were still at the company.
The layoffs came after the company had gone about a week without access to its internal messaging system, Slack, the Times reported. During previous layoffs staffers had used the messaging system to send farewell messages.
Over 200 employees were terminated as a result of the latest round of layoffs at the social media company, the publication said. The news confirmed previous reporting from Insider's Kali Hays that indicated Elon Musk was set to cut Twitter's headcount to its lowest level in over a decade. Since the billionaire purchased Twitter in October, he has laid off thousands of employees — more than halving the company.
The billionaire had said in November that he wasn't planning any further layoffs. The latest round of cuts impacted some of Musk's top lieutenants, including several founders of small tech companies Twitter had acquired and the executive heading up Twitter Blue, the tech newsletter Platformer first reported.
A spokesperson for Twitter, which previously cut most of its communications department, did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk addressed the recent layoffs in an email to Twitter employees on Monday, according to a report from The Verge. In a memo, titled "Performance Awards," the billionaire reportedly said employees who have survived the cuts will receive "very significant" stock awards based on their performance.
"This past week, we completed a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company," Musk said in the email, according to The Verge. "Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them."
Twitter staff are not the only employees to learn they had been laid off when attempting to go about their usual day-to-day activities. In January, Insider reported that some Google staff learned they had lost their jobs when their badges didn't work at the office. Last year, several Coinbase employees discovered they had been laid off when they were unable to login to their work emails.
