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March 29, 2024

Twitter fired at least 200 employees on Saturday night, or 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 been steadily laying off about 7,500 workers to cut costs.

The layoffs came a week after the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate with each other. Five current and former employees told The New York Times that Slack, the company’s internal messaging service, has gone offline, leaving employees unable to chat with each other or look up company data. On Saturday night, some employees found their company email accounts and laptops logged out, three of them said – the first hint that layoffs had begun.

By Sunday morning, the extent of the cuts became clear. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while those keeping their jobs scrambled to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to see who was left. By 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 hit product managers, data scientists and engineers who work on machine learning and site reliability, which help keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team responsible for maintaining Twitter’s money-making service has been reduced from 30 people to fewer than eight, a person familiar with the matter said.

Affected by the layoffs are several founders of small tech companies Twitter has acquired over the years, including Esther Crawford, who founded a screen-sharing and video chat app called Squad and recently oversaw Twitter’s effort to charge users verification responses. In 2021, Twitter acquired Haraldur Thorleifsson, founder of design studio Ueno, for the work of marking fees. Several of the founders received higher compensation packages as part of the company takeover, which could make firing them more costly as stock and bonuses have been paid, said three people familiar with the compensation package.

Saturday’s layoffs are among the largest since Mr. Musk told staff at an internal meeting in late November that no more layoffs were planned. The layoffs follow massive layoffs in early November, when Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s workforce within a week of taking ownership of the company. Since then, smaller layoffs and resignations have brought Twitter’s workforce down to about 2,000 people.



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