Twitter has laid off 30% of its talent acquisition team, including recruiters and others tasked with hiring new employees, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The layoffs follow an earlier announcement of a partial hiring freeze, as costs look set to be cut amid a likely takeover by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk.

A Twitter spokesman said affected employees will receive severance packages and the remaining recruitment staff will be reprioritized due to declining hiring.

Twitter has paused most hiring and backfills, apart from the most critical roles.

In a post on LinkedIn, Ingrid Johnson, a senior technical recruiter at Twitter, confirmed the redundancies and spoke of a “really tough day.”

“There are people losing their jobs that have been there over a decade. If Twitter has chosen to spend potential billions suing Elon and maintaining a falsely inflated stock price at the expense of the people who gave their lives building the company- that is an even more tragic story,” Johnson said.

The sources for this piece include an article in Engadget.