From the outside, Looks like not much has changed in the repurposed 1970s office block that serves as Twitter’s European headquarters. But inside, the mood had turned sour.
Just like in the US, Twitter’s teams across Europe have come under heavy layoffs. Staff at the 1 Cumberland Place office in Dublin, Ireland, which once housed around 500 Twitter employees, used the term war to describe the events of the past week. One person with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named, said those who are still employees are “survivors” and colleagues who have been fired are “collapsed”. The first time employees in Ireland received word from the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, was on November 10, nearly two weeks after he took over. In an email, they were told they would have to work in the office 40 hours a week.
There is no centralized list of those who have been fired. Instead, employees looked at their colleagues’ statuses on the workplace messaging app Slack to see if they were still working. Dublin is not the only European office affected by layoffs. Social media posts show staff in Brussels and London have also been laid off. It’s not clear if employees at Twitter’s other European hubs—Hamburg, Madrid, Utrecht, Paris, Berlin and Manchester—were also affected.
In Europe, a major concern is the fate of Twitter’s six- to eight-person team in Brussels, the European policy working group and the main point of contact with regulators working on legislation. The upcoming may affect the entire platform. Only two people were left, saying that they had knowledge on the matter.
That means Twitter has cut its team as the European Union rolls out landmark new tech rules, said Mathias Vermeulen, director of Brussels-based consulting firm AWO. “It’s certainly not a good view at a time when so many obligations will be imposed on companies and at a time when managers expect meaningful relationships with people based in the world. headquarters in Brussels.” By comparison, Meta and Google employ between 20 and 30 people each in the city, he said. Twitter did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Even before the takeover, the company faced a wave of scrutiny within the bloc. Tests against Twitter are pending in France, Germany and the Netherlands for hate speech, defamation. and privacy. There is also concern in Ireland that Twitter has failed to follow the country’s strict hiring rules while conducting mass layoffs. Ireland’s Tánaiste (or deputy head of government), Leo Varadkar, has yet to receive notice of a collective redundancy related to potential redundancy at Twitter as required by law, the spokesman said. of the Irish Department of Business, Trade and Employment told WIRED. And with growing unease in the European Parliament about Musk’s commitment to complying with the new European Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts, now their policy team in Brussels has reduced to one skeleton staff.
Europe has been eager to demonstrate that its rules carry weight with the world’s biggest tech platforms, including Twitter. In May, European Commissioner Thierry Breton posted a video on Twitter showing him discussing the Digital Services Act with Elon Musk. “That’s totally in line with my thinking,” Musk said in the clip. However, Musk’s comments about free speech and employee layoffs among censorship groups have worried Europeans. Trust and Safety, the group responsible for content moderation, has lost 15 percent of employees worldwide, according to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity.
