Twitter just cut even more jobs in another round of layoffs
More than 200 employees have reportedly been laid off
After cutting half of its workforce last year, Twitter has laid off at least another 200 more employees over the weekend.
As the New York Times reports, about 10% of the company’s remaining workforce was cut in an effort to save costs. CEO Elon Musk last month shared that Twitter had around 2,300 active employees, leaving the company significantly reduced from the 7,500-strong workforce it had when he took over the platform last year.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter job cuts
🙁 Twitter has cut more staff
👢 Around 200 employees have reportedly been laid off
🧵 It’s the latest in a string of big tech layoffs
⚙ Don’t expect Musk to stop tinkering away with the platform, though
The layoffs reportedly hit product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked across machine learning, site reliability and Twitter’s monetization infrastructure.
Product manager Esther Crawford was one of the more high-profile employees to be laid off. She oversaw several projects on the platform, including the launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service that lets users send very, very long tweets and edit their thoughts after sharing them.
Crawford drew a fair bit of attention back in November after tweeting a picture of herself sleeping on the floor in Twitter’s office. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadline sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she said.
Several big tech companies have announced layoffs over the past few months. Meta cut 11,000 employees after overestimating its growth, Microsoft followed with 10,000 last month, and Google wasn’t far behind with 12,000 job cuts.
More changes at Twitter HQ are likely on the horizon, including at the very top. Speaking to Bloomberg earlier this month, Musk said he wants to “stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place” before potentially replacing himself as CEO “before the end of the year”.
Musk has made several major changes to the platform since taking it over. As well as rolling out Twitter Blue he’s introduced a ban on third-party clients, added a view counter to the bottom of each tweet, and pushed algorithmically determined content ahead of user-curated posts.
It’s unlikely those changes will let up any time soon. Musk has already entertained a lot of new ideas for Twitter since taking over the platform, and it doesn’t look like even a pared-down workforce will stop that continuing.