Twitter Lays Off Almost 200 Employees, About 10 Percent of Its Workforce

In what can be considered its biggest layoff since last November, Twitter has fired at least 200 employees, or about 10% of its current employees, as per the latest reports.

On Saturday night, employees noticed that they were not able to log in to their corporate accounts. Last week, the company’s internal messaging tool, Slack, was taken offline and employees complained that they were neither able to communicate with each other, nor able to look up company data, New York Times reported.

Who Has Been Impacted by Twitter Layoffs?

This latest round of lay-offs has impacted Product Managers, Data Scientists, and engineers who had been working on machine learning and site reliability, which supports Twitter’s website and app.

Tech founders whose companies Twitter had acquired were also affected by the layoffs. One among them was Martin de Kuijper, the founder of Revue, a newsletter platform that Twitter took over in 2021. Esther Crawford, who founded a screen-sharing app, and now worked on Twitter payments and the Twitter Blue Tick was also laid off this weekend.

Last month, Elon Musk clarified that Twitter had 2,300 active employees after a news report alleged that the micro-blogging website only had 1,300 employees and fewer than 550 full-time engineers.

Twitter’s previous massive mass lay-off took place last November when almost 3,700 employees were laid-off to reduce costs, a week after Elon Musk took over the company for $44 billion.

Twitter Layoffs in India

Closer home, Twitter India shut down two of its three offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, telling employees to work from home this month. Last year, almost 90% of the company’s Indian workforce was laid-off. Employees from product and engineering teams who worked on a global mandate were those affected. Currently, Twitter has only one office in Bengaluru, where most of its engineers work from.

There has been a wave of layoffs across tech companies. There are reports that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also planning another round of layoffs to downsize the company. Last year, Meta fired almost 11,000 employees in a bid to cut costs.

Source: New York Times