Twitter has frozen its staff's equity award accounts in one of the most significant signs that Elon Musk's takeover deal is close to completion, Bloomberg reported.

Twitter updated its employees' FAQs on Monday with a notice saying that the ability to access or trade shares on its Equity Award Center had been halted. The accounts enable staff to check the status of their stock compensation.

"This freeze allows Schwab to perform final reconciliation of employee accounts prior to close of the acquisition," the notice read, per Bloomberg.

Two people familiar with the change told Bloomberg that the page said the change was made "in anticipation of the closing of the pending acquisition of Twitter by an entity controlled by Elon Musk."

Musk, the world's richest person and CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, is amidst a dilemmatic $44-billion deal to acquire the social media behemoth. Musk first offered to buy the firm in April after accumulating a 9.2% share, making him its biggest shareholder, and trying to join its board of directors.

However, the billionaire seemed hesitant the following month, and in July he sent a letter to Twitter terminating the deal, claiming that the social media platform had withheld or distorted data on the number of bots accounts on the platform.

Within days, Twitter sued Musk, accusing him of "refusing to honor his obligations." Musk countersued later in July, alleging that Twitter intentionally miscounted the number of spam accounts as part of what he called "its scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects."

After months of Musk trying to abandon the deal, Musk's lawyers sent Twitter a letter renewing the original offer at $54.20 a share on October 4.