Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees late Saturday, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily reduced his workforce of around 7,500 as he has sought to cut costs.
The layoffs came after a week in which the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate. The company’s internal messaging service, Slack, went 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 found they were logged out of their email accounts and corporate laptops, three of the people said, the first indication the layoffs had begun.
On Sunday morning, the extent of the cuts became clear. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post goodbye messages, while workers who had kept their jobs rushed to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine who else was left. As of Saturday night, 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 help keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, has been cut from 30 people to fewer 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 effort to charge users for the check marks, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, the creator of design studio Ueno, which Twitter bought in 2021. Several of the founders received higher compensation packages as part of their company acquisitions, which could make it more expensive. fire them as their stocks and bonuses are paid off, said three people familiar with the compensation packages.
Saturday’s round of layoffs was one of the biggest since Musk told employees in an internal meeting in late November that there were no further plans for downsizing. The cuts followed a mass layoff in early November, when Musk cut about half of Twitter’s workforce within a week of owning the company. Since then, small layoffs and resignations have reduced Twitter’s staff to around 2,000 employees.
