Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees late Saturday, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily reduced his workforce of around 7,500 as he has sought to cut costs.
The layoffs came after a week in which the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate. The company’s internal messaging service, Slack, went offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or looking up company data, five current and former employees told The New York Times. On Saturday night, some employees found they were logged out of their email accounts and corporate laptops, three of the people said, the first indication the layoffs had begun.
On Sunday morning, the extent of the cuts became apparent. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post goodbye messages, while workers who had kept their jobs rushed to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine who else was left. By late Saturday, the remaining employees had also lost access to a Google chat service associated with their work email accounts, three people said.
The cuts affected product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which help keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, has been reduced to fewer than eight people out of 30, a person familiar with the matter said.
