Two men posing as laid-off Twitter employees pranked several media outlets Friday.
The ruse comes a day after Elon Musk assumed control of the company and rumors that he planned to lay off at least 75% of the staff. Musk and Twitter have said these rumors were not true.
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CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa interviewed the pair, who identified themselves as Twitter employees while standing near the company’s San Francisco headquarters holding cardboard boxes.
“It’s happening,” Bosa said in a tweet accompanied by a photo of the two men. “Entire team of data engineers let go. These are two of them.”
Several media outlets, including Bloomberg, the Daily Mail, and NBC, were among the outlets that reported layoffs were underway at Twitter following the pair’s interview, according to the New York Post.
Many online were skeptical of the pair who identified themselves as “Rahul Ligma” and “Daniel Johnson.”
Ligma is a reference to a popular internet meme, according to The Verge, which confirmed the pair did not work for Twitter and had, in fact, carried out a hoax.
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After speculation the men were involved in a hoax grew, Bosa acknowledged on Twitter there was confusion about whether layoffs were actually underway.
CNBC has since updated its story with an editor’s note saying it “could not confirm the identities of the individuals.”
