Elon Musk's Twitter sued for violating federal law after mass firing

Elon Musk may be in legal trouble after issuing a mass layoff of Twitter employees.

According to FOX Business, on Thursday (Nov. 3), a class-action lawsuit by four employees — one former worker and three others who were locked out of their workplace accounts — was filed against the social media website. The suit claimed the company’s mass layoffs violates a federal law requiring 60 days notice for employees.

The news outlet reports a week after Musk bought the platform for $44 billion, a letter went out to employees telling them half of the company’s 7,500 employees would lose their jobs starting Friday (Nov. 4). “Team, in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the letter read. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is, unfortunately, necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act require large companies to notify workers two months before planned job cuts. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the San Francisco suit, said, “We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt to make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights. We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees. It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”

As reported by the news outlet, Liss-Riordan took legal action after Musk’s electric car company laid off 10 percent of its employees. A Texas judge ordered Tesla’s employees to go through dispute resolution.

Musk fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as Twitter’s owner. Additionally, he replaced the company’s board of directors with himself as the sole member.