A laid-off Twitter manager says he saw almost his entire team of 150 people get fired in 4 hours just a week after Elon Musk bought the company

• A laid-off Twitter manager said he watched most of his team of 150 staff get fired in four hours.
• Amir Shevat said his engineers text him, saying their computers were "bricked."

A Twitter manager who was laid off said he saw nearly all of his team get fired in the space of four hours just a week after Elon Musk bought the platform.

"That was a hard night," Amir Shevat, former head of product for Twitter's developer platform, told Insider on Tuesday. His team was made up of 150 employees with a range of roles from engineering to marketing, he said.

The first wave of Twitter layoffs happened on November 4. Shevat said he and his team were keeping in touch over text messages because they didn't know what was going to happen.

Shevat said he then received a message from one of his engineers, saying "My computer is bricked," meaning the screen had turned gray and the device had stopped working. Another worker also said their laptop had shut down, Shevat added.

"Throughout about three to four hours, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., I saw most of my entire team get fired," Shevat said.

At around 1 a.m., Shevat looked at his personal phone and saw he was locked out of the company Slack account and work emails. This was the way that many other Twitter staff found out about being laid off.

Twitter sent Shevat an email to his personal account, saying the company had laid him off. According to Shevat, Twitter said he would receive information about the severance package the following week, but the company never sent it to him.

Shevat said he went to Twitter's HR department and the legal team to discuss the layoffs, but due to mass firings, "there wasn't a single person as a point of contact that we could talk to," he said.

There were further layoffs after November 4, including around Thanksgiving. In response to a question about how many team members were cut, Shevat said: "All of them but two."

"What Elon did was not right. It was not right on multiple levels," Shevat said, who has since filed an arbitration claim against Musk with the help of his attorney, Lisa Bloom. Bloom told Insider that Twitter was a "textbook case of how not to do layoffs."

Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Are you a former or current Twitter employee? Do you have a story to share? Get in touch with this reporter via email kduffy@insider.com, kate.duffy01@protonmail.com, or DM for Signal.