Twitter sued for $500 million over unpaid severance, sues web scrapers

A new lawsuit, filed by former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian, claims the company owes its laid off workers $500 million in severance pay. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed on Wednesday against Twitter, which is now legally known as X Corp.

According to McMillian, Twitter's severance package was created in 2019 and offered employees two months of base pay in addition to one week of pay for every year they worked at the social media company. Senior employees were also owed a total of six month base pay, regardless of how much time they spent working at Twitter.

Of course, then Elon Musk came along. In October 2022, Musk took over Twitter and the company had several rounds of layoffs in the months that followed. Some employees received one month of severance pay, others received nothing at all, according to McMillian's filing.

And McMillian would know what Twitter offered its employees better than most. Before she was laid off in January, McMillian was Twitter's "head of total rewards" and oversaw the company's employee benefits program.

Now, this isn't the first time that former Twitter employees sued the company over unpaid benefits or severance pay. But, McMillian is the first to claim that the issue goes beyond a breach of contract. McMillian's suit accuses Musk of violating federal law, specifically the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, by not paying out severance as promised in the employee benefit package offered to employees.

Twitter launches legal action of its own over web scraping

Musk is used to being on the receiving end of these lawsuits, but now – hot off the legal threat it sent Meta over its Twitter competitor Threads – the company is dishing out some lawsuits too.

On Wednesday, Twitter filed a lawsuit against four anonymous entities in Texas over alleged web scraping activity. 

Nearly two weeks ago, Musk made some big changes at Twitter, temporarily blocking visitors from accessing the website unless they were logged into an account. Then, the company rate limited logged in users, only allowing them to view hundreds of tweets per day. Twitter explained that the moves were necessary due to bad faith usage by data scrapers putting strains on the company's systems.

"Several entities tried to scrape every tweet ever made in a short period of time," Musk tweeted in reply to a Twitter user commenting on the lawsuit. "That is why we had to put rate limits in place."

According to Twitter's lawsuit against the scrapers, the platform experience an extremely high volume of automated signups from four IP addresses connected to the entities that the company is suing. Twitter claims that this activity could not have come from an individual user and that it put excess strain on Twitter's servers and degraded the experience for Twitter's customers. Twitter is seeking monetary damages of more than $1 million.

It remains to be seen exactly how these cases will go. But, throw in the multiple previous lawsuits Twitter has been dealing with, such as the suits claiming Musk isn't paying the company's bills or rent, and it's certain that Twitter's lawyers won't run out of things to do any time soon