The layoffs came a week after the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate. Five current and former employees told The New York Times that Slack, the company’s internal messaging service, went offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or searching for company data.
Twitter laid off at least 200 workers Saturday night, about 10% of the company’s roughly 2,000 employees, three people familiar with the matter said. Elon Musk, who bought the social media platform in October, has phased out around 7,500 employees in a bid to cut costs.
The layoffs came a week after the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate. Five current and former employees told The New York Times that Slack, the company’s internal messaging service, went offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or searching for company data.
On Saturday evening, some employees discovered that their company’s email accounts and laptops had been disconnected – the first hint that the layoffs had begun, three of them said.
On Sunday morning, the extent of the cuts became clear. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while those who kept their jobs rushed to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to see who was left behind. On Saturday evening, the remaining employees also lost access to the Google chat service associated with their work email accounts, three people familiar with the matter said.
The layoffs affect product managers, data scientists, and engineers working on machine learning and site reliability, who help keep various Twitter functions online. The monetization infrastructure team responsible for maintaining Twitter’s monetization service has shrunk from 30 people to less than eight, a person familiar with the matter said.
Several founders of small tech companies acquired by Twitter over the years are affected by the layoffs, including Esther Crawford, who founded a screen sharing and video chat app called Squad and was recently responsible for user recruitment by Twitter for Work verification fees.
Thorleifsson, the founder of the design studio Ueno, acquired Twitter in 2021. Several of the founders have been offered higher compensation packages as part of the company’s takeover, which could make their firing more costly as they have already paid out stock and bonuses, said three people familiar with the compensation package.
Saturday’s layoffs are among the largest since Musk told employees at an internal meeting in late November that no further layoffs were planned. The layoffs follow massive layoffs in early November when Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce within a week of taking ownership of the company. Smaller layoffs and resignations have since reduced Twitter’s workforce to around 2,000.
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