Fresh Trouble for Elon Musk: Twitter Sued for Mass Lay-offs Without Enough Notice

Mass lay-offs at Twitter are set to begin on Friday after the San Francisco-based company informed staff via email that it will shut down its offices temporarily and suspend access to staff. The social media giant's move is reportedly part of new owner Elon Musk's restructuring plan that aims to save $1Bln through cost cuts.

In fresh trouble for Twitter's new chief executive Elon Musk, the social media giant is being sued for his plan to lay-off about half the company's workforce.

A suit on the matter was filed in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday in which the complainant alleged that Twitter was eliminating nearly 3,700 of its workers without giving them enough notice, violating US law.

According to the US federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, a large organization cannot trigger layoffs without 60 days' notice to the employees.

The petition urges the court to restrain Twitter from forcing its workers to sign severance deals with the company to avoid litigation in future. Plus, the lawsuit wants the social media giant to follow the guidelines laid out in the WARN Act.

"We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt the make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights," Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer who filed the complaint, told reporters.

After Musk completed his $44Bln acquisition of Twitter and became its chief executive this week, Twitter witnessed some dramatic changes.

In his first move at the microblogging platform, Musk sacked the company's former boss Parag Agrawal and other top executives, including the legal, policy, and trust department chief Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and general counsel Sean Edgett.

After firing the leadership, Musk announced that verified users will now be charged $8 for a blue tick on Twitter, a service he plans to roll out officially next week.