Twitter stealthily lays off 10% of remaining workers, including tech staff

According to a report published by the New York Times on Sunday, about 10% of the remaining workforce of embattled social media giant Twitter, including staff charged with keeping the platform functional, found they had been laid off over the weekend.

According to the report, about 200 data scientists, product managers and engineers working on issues such as site reliability were down just days after the company took part of its internal communications infrastructure offline. These cuts are the latest of several to hit Twitter since Elon Musk’s acquisition at the end of 2022. Fewer than 2,000 employees remain at Twitter, of the roughly 7,500 that were in place before the company’s private deal.

The Times report said the company shut down its Slack instance early last week, making it more difficult for employees to communicate with each other, and that some employees did not discover they had been fired until they logged out of Twitter’s systems, including email accounts and laptops. In addition, a Google chat platform operated by the company for its employees was shut down over the weekend.

Esther Crawford, the head of Twitter Blue — the company’s verification service that started charging users a monthly fee for the coveted “blue tick” on their profile — was among those ousted in the latest, according to widespread reports. round of layoffs. Crawford was the founder of a social screen sharing app called Squad, which was bought by Twitter in 2020 for an undisclosed sum.

Shortly after Musk’s acquisition, he made large-scale layoffs that in some cases affected entire departments. Since then there have been several more rounds of layoffs and many more employees left the company after the heir to the billionaire Emerald Mine issued an ultimatum to the remaining staff, saying they would have to work in an “extremely hard” way to keep going.

A request for comment sent to Twitter has received no response as of the publication of this article.

The layoffs at Twitter come as technology companies, faced with an uncertain global economy and slowing revenue growth, have stepped up the pace of layoffs this year. After massive hiring during the pandemic, when lockdowns led to a shift to remote working and an increase in e-commerce and online communication, they are now facing sales declines.