Twitter is driving without brakes in laying off employees. The social media platform has laid off at least 200 of its workforce or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 employees, according to a New York Times report. The layoff impacted product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, said the report citing people familiar with the matter. The report also said that Twitter’s internal messaging service Slack was taken offline a week ago, preventing employees from chatting with each other or looking up company data.
Among the employees who were asked to leave was long-term Musk loyalist Esther Crawford who was the new Twitter Blue head and also the Chief Executive of Twitter Payments. According to reports, Crawford was terminated because of the lacklustre response to Twitter Blue. This is just days after Twitter fired dozens of its employees across sales and engineering departments.
Elon Musk had internally given a directive to revamp Twitter’s ad targeting in a week in order to fix what he has called ‘the worst ad relevance on Earth’. The layoff was announced at the end of the deadline. Before this, Twitter had shut two of its three India offices and asked its staff to work from home.
Elon Musk had, earlier in November, promised that layoffs were over after terminating roughly two-thirds of the workforce in just a few weeks of his taking over as the CEO. This, now, is the fourth round of job cuts at Twitter since November. Musk had said that the service was experiencing a ‘massive drop in revenue’ as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation. The social media platform had recently started sharing revenue from advertisements with some of its content creators. Last year, Musk eliminated more than 3,700 jobs at Twitter, or half of the company’s workforce, in a bid to drive down costs following his $44 billion acquisition.
