In latest round of job cuts, Twitter reportedly laid off at least 200 employees

Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees Saturday night, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10% of the roughly 2,000 people still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily cut its workforce by around 7,500 employees as it seeks to cut costs.

The layoffs came after a week when the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate. The company’s internal messaging service, Slack, was taken offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or viewing company data, five current and former employees told The New York Times. On Saturday evening, some employees found they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, three of the people said – the first hint that the layoffs had begun.

By Sunday morning, the scope of the cuts was becoming clear. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while workers who had kept their jobs rushed to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to figure out who else was staying. As of Saturday evening, the remaining employees had also lost access to a Google chat service associated with their work emails, three people said.

The cuts affected product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online. The Monetization Infrastructure team, which runs the services Twitter makes money from, has been reduced from 30 people to less than eight, a person familiar with the matter said.

Among those affected by the layoffs were several founders of small tech companies that Twitter had acquired over the years, including Esther Crawford, who founded a startup called Squad and recently oversaw Twitter’s efforts to charge users for check marks, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, the creator of design studio Ueno, which Twitter bought in 2021. their shares and bonuses are paid, said three people familiar with compensation packages.

Saturday’s round of layoffs was one of the largest since Mr Musk told employees at an internal meeting in late November that there were no further plans to cut staff. The cuts followed a massive layoff in early November, when Mr. Musk eliminated about half of Twitter’s workforce a week from his ownership of the company. Smaller layoffs and resignations had since reduced Twitter’s staff to around 2,000 employees.