Twitter Gets Sued by Laid Off Employees Following Elon Musk’s Takeover

Twitter and Elon Musk may be in for some trouble soon.

The employees that Twitter fired in a mass layoff following Elon Musk's takeover of the company had recently filed a class-action lawsuit against it.

Twitter, through Musk's orders, previously laid off 25% of Twitter's employees to improve the company's cash flow and profitability, with more layoffs allegedly waiting to happen within the day.

Twitter Class-Action Lawsuit Details

Twitter's former employees allege in their class-action lawsuit that the company did not give enough notice before it terminated them. As such, it violated the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) and the California WARN Act, per The Verge.

The two acts require companies to give workers at least 60 days of advance notice before a mass layoff occurs.

This class-action lawsuit named five Twitter employees as its plaintiffs and was filed in the US District Court in San Francisco. One of the plaintiffs had already been fired by the lawsuit's filing, while three others were presumably fired as they are reportedly unable to access company accounts - an action taken as a sign of their impending termination.

This presumption is supported by the Twitter posts of many alleged now-former Twitter employees, who discovered that they couldn't access their work email accounts or log into their work laptops, per The Guardian.

Furthermore, the lawsuit cited a similar case in Musk's other company, Tesla. This particular lawsuit named two of the company's former employees as its plaintiffs, with them also alleging that Tesla violated the WARN Act.

Monster.com mentioned in its article that employees who were not given the 60-day notice could seek damages for back pay and benefits for up to two months - the same period the law requires employers to give employees affected by mass layoffs.

Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing the former Tesla and Twitter employees, revealed that the lawsuit was filed in an attempt to make employees aware of the rights they should not sign away and an avenue to pursue them.

Twitter's Mass Layoffs Following Musk's Takeover

The lawsuit's filing follows the initial mass layoffs after Musk took over Twitter from its previous leadership. However, the layoffs didn't stop there.

You may remember that Twitter will be terminating the employment of many of its employees today as part of Musk's plan to improve the company's cash flow and profitability.

As a result, Twitter's employees are waiting for an email that determines if they are staying in the company, per an email Twitter sent to its employees on early Nov. 4.

This email said that the layoffs following Musk's takeover were "unfortunately necessary" to help place the company "on a healthy path" to ensure its success moving forward, per the Washington Post.

This mass layoff affected the likes of Twitter's former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and the company policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, per Fox Business.

Those fortunate to stay will receive an email on their work email saying that they "'role' at Twitter." Meanwhile, the unfortunate ones will receive an email detailing the steps they must take on their email as a result of their termination.