In Latest Round of Job Cuts, Twitter Is Said to Lay Off at Least 200 Employees

Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees on Saturday night, said three people familiar with the matter, or about 10 percent of the approximately 2,000 who still work for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily shed its workforce of around 7,500 to cut costs.

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

The scope of the cuts became clear on Sunday morning. Some Twitter workers used the platform to post farewell messages, while workers who kept their jobs used encrypted messaging services like Signal to see who was left. By Saturday night, the remaining employees had also lost access to a Google chat service linked to their work email, three people said.

The cuts hit product managers, data scientists and engineers working on machine learning and website reliability, which is helping keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, which manages the services that make Twitter money, has been reduced from 30 to fewer than eight people, 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 start-up called Squad and recently oversaw Twitter’s efforts to charge users for verification ticks, and Haraldur Thorleifsson. the creator of the design studio Ueno, which Twitter bought in 2021. Several of the founders received higher compensation packages as part of their companies’ acquisitions, which could make the layoff more expensive as their stock and bonuses are paid out, three people familiar with the compensation packages said.

Saturday’s round of layoffs was one of the largest since Mr Musk told employees in an internal meeting at the end of November that no more downsizing was planned. The cuts followed a mass layoff in early November, when Mr. Musk fired about half of Twitter’s workforce into his ownership of the company within a week. Smaller layoffs and layoffs had meanwhile reduced Twitter’s staff to around 2,000 employees.