WIRED: Employees of Twitter who announced that their layoffs would be terminated by 9:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time are going through an Arbitration Process

If employees received a letter stating that they would be laid off by 9 a.m.Pacific Standard Time, it was obtained by multiple media outlets. The email did not state how many people would lose their jobs.

Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. There was an email to staff which said jobs were needed to ensure the company’s success.

Seven former Twitter employees who spoke to WIRED said they had not received information about their severance, despite some coming up to or being past their last day at the company. Last month, a handful of former employees announced that they would be filing arbitration cases against the company, alleging that it had violated the WARN Act and that its handling of the layoffs constituted a breach of contract.

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to Twitter to express support for each other — often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo — and salute emojis in replies to each other.

Barry C. White, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said Thursday the agency has not received any recent have not received any recent such notifications from Twitter.

The pressure on Twitter to respond to employees’ complaints: Arbitration fees could pile up a titanic burden for an employer struggling with dispute resolution

It’s only a few people who have done that now, but they may soon be forced to pay millions of dollars in legal fees. Rafael Nendel‑Flores, a California-based employment lawyer, says the legal strategy of filing multiple arbitration suits, which is likely a way to get around the constraints of a dispute resolution agreement, will pile pressure on Twitter. “Just the arbitration fees alone could be massive,” he says.

The parent company of Facebook recently posted its second quarterly revenue decline in history and its shares are currently trading at their lowest levels since 2015. Meta’s disappointing results followed weak earnings reports from Google parent Alphabet and even Microsoft.

That’s because employers, in this case Twitter, are required to shoulder the cost of the arbitration process. And having hundreds or thousands of cases to contend with all at once could be a significant financial and administrative burden for a company already struggling with a massive loss in advertiser revenue. The price of each case can easily be between $50,000 and $100,000. “That is, in my view, a significant pressure point—that Ms. Bloom and probably other plaintiffs’ lawyers are going to try and push these individual arbitration cases.”

And Bloom’s clients are not alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing another group of Twitter employees, notified the company that his clients, too, would be filing arbitration suits if the company did not “unequivocally confirm” that former employees would be given the full severance they say Twitter promised them.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee.

One former employee, who was laid off in November, is waiting on legal proceedings to see whether they’ll be given severance at all—and is not confident they will be. A person who lost his job in early November hasn’t heard from the company.

A former employee from Twitter’s Accra, Ghana, office, which was open for less than a week before its entire staff was laid off, says that they, “like other staff globally, were assured severance but have not heard from them yet.” The former employee wasn’t sure what recourse they could have against the company.

While some chose to wait until their official status as employees expired on January 4, others chose to take preemptive legal action against the company.