Twitter, now owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, sacked half of its workforce on Friday as part of a move to make the platform profitable. Though full details of the job cuts are not yet available, reports state almost 50 per cent of Twitter's staff have been affected by the latest move.
In India, too, Twitter announced massive layoffs which affected the entire marketing and communications department, NDTV reported. The US-based social media platform, in an internal email to employees earlier, said, "In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday." Ahead of the layoffs, Twitter closed access to its offices worldwide, asking employees to stay at home to await news of their fate through an email.
Responding to the developments, Musk tweeted on Saturday: "Regarding Twitter's reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.” He added that everyone was “offered 3 months of severance, which is “50 per cent more than legally required.”
Musk also took to Twitter to complain about the platform's 'massive drop in revenue', and blamed 'activists group' for pressuring the advertisers. “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” he said.
Soon after he acquired the social media platform, Musk seized control by firing top chief executives including CEO Parag Agrawal and legal and policy affairs chief Vijaya Gadde. Musk has also announced that he will be forming a 'content moderation council'.
Twitter will start charging users for the blue tick verifying the account holder. Earlier this week, Musk confirmed that the microblogging website will now charge its owners $8 a month for its Blue service, which includes the "verified" badge.
