Elon Musk's Twitter Inc laid off dozens of employees on Saturday in one of the largest since Musk acquired the company in October for $44 billion.
New York Times reported that the work force at Twitter is less than 2,000, down from 7,500 when Elon Musk took it over. In this round, what is at least the eighth round of job cuts, the social network has laid off at least 200 employees, or about 10 per cent of its workforce.
Esther Crawford, Director of Product Management at Twitter, who oversaw the Twitter Blue verification subscription, has also been laid off. Her photo of sleeping in a silver sleeping bag at Twitter's office to meet a deadline had gone viral.
"The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos," she tweeted soon after her termination.
A week ego, the company has disabled internal messaging service, Slack, to prevent employees from from chatting with each other or looking up company data.
The layoffs have affected different departments including advertising team and multiple engineering teams that keep Twitter's systems running.
Tech website The Information first reported that at least 50 people were laid off on Saturday.
"Hearing that the Twitter layoffs last night were well above 50 and hit multiple departments including engineering. If you know more, get in touch," tweeted Zoë Schiffer, managing editor at Platformer.
Chief Executive Musk said in November that the service was experiencing a "massive drop in revenue" as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation. Twitter recently started sharing revenue from advertisements with some of its content creators. Revenue from ads that appear on a creator's reply threads will be shared.
World's richest businessman Musk began his innings at Twitter last week by firing the CEO Parag Agrawal as well as the CFO and some other top executives. Twitter has fired the majority of its over 200 employees in India as part of mass layoffs across the globe.
The company had posted a net loss of USD 270 million in the second quarter ended June 30, 2022 compared to a profit of USD 66 million in the same period a year ago.
The revenue of Twitter had declined to USD 1,176 million during the June 2022 quarter from USD 1,190 million a year ago. Advertisement revenue had increased by 2 per cent to USD 1.08 billion while subscription and other revenue declined by 27 per cent to USD 101 million on a year-over-year basis.