Twitter began laying off the bulk of its contract workforce on Saturday, offering no warning to the affected contractors, whose number was reported to be in the thousands.
No official number had been confirmed by Sunday night, but Platformer, the tech blog that first reported the cull, said that 4,400 of 5,500 contractors were hit by the sudden dismissals.
The mass firings affected workers in content moderation, core infrastructure, real estate, engineering—and, according to one manager who spoke with Platformer’s Casey Newton, Twitter’s “child safety workflows.”