Twit­ter be­gan wide­spread lay­offs Fri­day as new own­er Elon Musk over­hauls the com­pa­ny, rais­ing grave con­cerns about chaos en­velop­ing the plat­form and its abil­i­ty to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion just days ahead of the U.S. midterm elec­tions.

The speed and size of the cuts al­so opened Musk and Twit­ter to law­suits. At least one was filed Thurs­day in San Fran­cis­co al­leg­ing Twit­ter has vi­o­lat­ed fed­er­al law by not pro­vid­ing fired em­ploy­ees the re­quired no­tice.

The com­pa­ny had told work­ers by email that they would find out Fri­day if they had been laid off. It did not say how many of the rough­ly 7,500 em­ploy­ees would lose their jobs.

Musk didn’t con­firm or cor­rect in­vestor Ron Baron at a Fri­day con­fer­ence in New York when he asked the bil­lion­aire Tes­la CEO how much mon­ey he would save af­ter he “fired half of Twit­ter.”

Musk re­spond­ed by talk­ing about Twit­ter’s cost and rev­enue chal­lenges and blamed ac­tivists who urged big com­pa­nies to halt ad­ver­tis­ing on the plat­form. Musk hasn’t com­ment­ed on the lay­offs them­selves.

“The ac­tivist groups have been suc­cess­ful in caus­ing a mas­sive drop in Twit­ter ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enue, and we’ve done our ab­solute best to ap­pease them and noth­ing is work­ing,” he said.

Some em­ploy­ees of the San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny got clues about their pend­ing dis­missal when they lost ac­cess to their work ac­counts hours ear­li­er. They and oth­ers tweet­ed mes­sages of sup­port us­ing the hash­tag #OneTeam. The email to staff said job re­duc­tions were “nec­es­sary to en­sure the com­pa­ny’s suc­cess mov­ing for­ward.”

No oth­er so­cial me­dia plat­form comes close to Twit­ter as a place where pub­lic agen­cies and oth­er vi­tal ser­vice providers — elec­tion boards, po­lice de­part­ments, util­i­ties, schools and news out­lets — keep peo­ple re­li­ably in­formed. Many fear Musk’s lay­offs will gut it and ren­der it law­less.

Sev­er­al em­ploy­ees who tweet­ed about los­ing their jobs said Twit­ter al­so elim­i­nat­ed their en­tire teams, in­clud­ing one fo­cused on hu­man rights and glob­al con­flicts, an­oth­er check­ing Twit­ter’s al­go­rithms for bias in how tweets get am­pli­fied, and an en­gi­neer­ing team de­vot­ed to mak­ing the so­cial plat­form more ac­ces­si­ble for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties.

Ed­die Perez, a Twit­ter civic in­tegri­ty team man­ag­er who quit in Sep­tem­ber, said he fears the lay­offs so close to the midterms could al­low dis­in­for­ma­tion to “spread like wild­fire” dur­ing the post-elec­tion vote-count­ing pe­ri­od in par­tic­u­lar.

“I have a hard time be­liev­ing that it doesn’t have a ma­te­r­i­al im­pact on their abil­i­ty to man­age the amount of dis­in­for­ma­tion out there,” he said, adding that there sim­ply may not be enough em­ploy­ees to beat it back.

Perez, a board mem­ber at the non­par­ti­san elec­tion in­tegri­ty non­prof­it OS­ET In­sti­tute, said the post-elec­tion pe­ri­od is par­tic­u­lar­ly per­ilous be­cause “some can­di­dates may not con­cede and some may al­lege elec­tion ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and that is like­ly to gen­er­ate a new cy­cle of false­hoods.”

Twit­ter’s em­ploy­ees have been ex­pect­ing lay­offs since Musk took the helm. He fired top ex­ec­u­tives, in­clud­ing CEO Parag Agraw­al, and re­moved the com­pa­ny’s board of di­rec­tors on his first day as own­er.

As the emailed no­tices went out, many Twit­ter em­ploy­ees took to the plat­form to ex­press sup­port for each oth­er — of­ten sim­ply tweet­ing blue heart emo­jis to sig­ni­fy its blue bird lo­go — and salute emo­jis in replies to each oth­er.

The sweep­ing lay­offs will jeop­ar­dize con­tent mod­er­a­tion stan­dards, ac­cord­ing to a coali­tion of civ­il rights groups, that es­ca­lat­ed their calls Fri­day for brands to pause ad­ver­tis­ing buys on the plat­form. The lay­offs are par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous ahead of the elec­tions, the groups warned, and for trans­gen­der users and oth­er groups fac­ing vi­o­lence in­spired by hate speech that pro­lif­er­ates on­line.