Twitter reportedly fires about 10% of remaining staff

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
27 Feb 2023 10:50

The latest round of layoffs at Twitter follows a week in which the firm made it tough for staff to communicate with one another.

An illustration photo taken on October 4, 2022, depicting a photo of Elon Musk on a phone with the Twitter logo in the background (AFP)

Twitter laid off at least another 200 employees on Saturday evening, The New York Times reported, citing persons familiar with the matter.

The 200 sacked employees accounted for around 10% of the approximately 2,000 persons still employed at Twitter, as per the report.

It is worth noting that the Twitter employee who went viral for her posts about sleeping at work to deliver for the company has reportedly been sacked as part of the latest wave of layoffs.

When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022

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. 💙
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023

Since Elon Musk bought the company in October 2022, he has steadily fired off its staff, starting with approximately 7,500, in an effort to cut costs, the report added.

Former Twitter employees said, as quoted by NYT, that the firings occurred after Twitter made it more difficult for its employees to communicate with one another by taking Slack, the company's internal messaging program, offline.

According to NYT, the company's mass layoffs peaked in November, with Musk firing roughly half of the workforce.

With the reduction of Twitter's workforce to around 2,000 employees, smaller layoffs and resignations occurred.

In late October, The Washington Post reported that Musk planned to lay off 25% of the Twitter workforce in an initial round of cuts after his takeover of the company.

Following his purchase, the billionaire began mass layoffs to optimize expenses.

It is worth mentioning that Twitter Inc. let off more than 90% of its employees in India, as part of Elon Musk's global layoffs, significantly depleting its engineering and product personnel in a prospective growth region.