Just three days after their official return, many employees at Twitter’s Africa Office in Ghana have been sacked as part of Elon Musk’s mass layoffs.
Employees at Twitter woke up to discover that they were unable to access their work laptops or access their tools because they had been logged out of their work emails.
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The layoffs will have an impact on Twitter’s recent expansion into Africa, though we are unable to confirm how many employees on the continent were let go. It poses a risk to opening new offices across the continent, particularly in Nigeria, where the construction of a physical office is dependent on the continued availability of the microblogging app in the nation.
A year ago Twitter entered Africa via Ghana. Today we officially opened Twitter’s Africa HQ in Accra, and for the first time all Tweeps in the region left their home desks and convened to work as #OneTeam . Worth celebrating amidst all the back to back news headlines ?? pic.twitter.com/O0hOpg4SLW
— Meistermind (@mistameister) November 1, 2022
The social media company intended to lay off about 3,700 people. After Elon Musk’s notice of the impending layoffs was posted last weekend, many US employees of Twitter were unable to log in to the company’s system.
Even though Twitter announced the opening of its Africa Office in Ghana last year, the majority of its African staff members spent the first year working from their respective homes and nations. They all started back up at the Ghana Office earlier this week. This was tweeted about by a senior partner manager for Twitter Ghana and Nigeria.
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The Senior Partner Manager also announced on Twitter that he was fired alongside others via a tweet.
Some of the affected employees filed a lawsuit challenging Twitter’s short notice of the layoffs. The lawsuit is based on the U.S. Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which prohibits large corporations from implementing mass layoffs without at least 60 days’ notice. The lawsuit requests that the court issue an order requiring Twitter to follow the WARN Act and prohibiting the company from soliciting employees to sign documents that could waive their right to participate in litigation.