Twitter is continuing its downsizing trend, this time letting go another 200 employees over the weekend.
According to The New York Times which cited people familiar with the matter, Twitter laid off at least 200 employees on Saturday night, representing approximately 10% of the remaining 2,000 workers. Elon Musk has been slowly reducing the social media platform’s company’s workforce since he became CEO in October, during when Twitter had around 7,200 employees.
In the week leading up to the layoffs, Twitter took its internal messaging service, Slack, offline, according to some employees employees, making it difficult for workers to communicate with each other or access company data. On Saturday night, employees discovered that they had been logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, providing the first indication that layoffs had begun.
Come Sunday morning, the scale of the layoffs had become apparent, with some Twitter employees posting goodbye messages on the platform while others used encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine whom among them still had a job at the company. The cuts reportedly affected various departments, including product managers, data scientists, engineers, and site reliability.
The layoffs also impacted several founders of small tech companies that Twitter had purchased throughout the years. These included Esther Crawford, the founder of Squad, a screen-sharing and video chat app, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, the creator of Ueno, a design studio that Twitter purchased in 2021. Some of the founders received generous compensation packages as part of the acquisitions, which could make it more expensive to lay them off as their stock and bonuses are paid out, The NYT said.
This round of layoffs was one of the largest since Musk told employees in November that there were no further plans for staff reductions.
Information for this briefing was found via the NYT. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
