Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees on Saturday night, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 who were still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily pared back its work force from about 7,500 employees as he has sought to reduce costs.
The layoffs came after a week when the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate with each other. The company’s internal messaging service, Slack, was taken 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 discovered that they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, three of the people said — the first hint that layoffs had begun.
By Sunday morning, the scope of the cuts was becoming clear. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while workers who had kept their jobs scrambled to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine who else was left. By Saturday night, the remaining employees had also lost access to a Google chat service associated with their work email accounts, three people said.
The cuts hit product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, was reduced to fewer than eight people from 30, a person familiar with the matter said.
Among those affected by the layoffs were several founders of small tech companies that Twitter had acquired over the years, including Esther Crawford, who co-founded a screen-sharing and video chat app called Squad and recently oversaw Twitter’s effort to charge users for verification check marks, and Haraldur Thorleifsson, the creator of the design studio Ueno, which Twitter purchased in 2021.
Several of the founders received higher compensation packages as part of the acquisitions of their companies, which could make it more expensive to lay them off as their stock and bonuses are paid out, three people familiar with the compensation packages said.
Saturday’s round of layoffs was one of the largest since Mr. Musk told employees in an internal meeting in late November that there were no more plans for staff reductions. The cuts followed a mass layoff in early November, when Mr. Musk eliminated about half of Twitter’s work force a week into his ownership of the company. Smaller layoffs and resignations had since reduced Twitter’s staff to around 2,000 employees.
Other employees who were laid off shared on social media that the news was broken to them after they had been locked out of work emails. Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday; “Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life.” These latest job losses follow a number of other job losses at large tech firms, as companies struggle to re-adapt to the post-Covid working environment. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all made lay-offs in the past few months.
Musk has taken a number of steps to try and right Twitter’s finances, following reports that the company was losing $4 million a day when he completed his purchase. Musk is reported to have made his first interest payment last month on the bank loan used to finance his takeover.
Hope you have a good Sunday.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023
First day of the rest of your life.
Around $13 billion of the $44 billion total was covered by banks, and Twitter is reported to have paid off $300 million of that figure. There have been controversies over the way Twitter has tried to turn its balance sheet around, including via closing its UK offices and reportedly not paying rent for the properties - leading to a lawsuit being filed against the company by Crown Estates in the UK.
Esther Crawford, the director of product management at Twitter who oversaw the introduction of charging for account verification, was reportedly among the employees affected.
Musk’s hard-driving approach to management was exemplified in November by a picture of Crawford sleeping on the floor of Twitter’s offices, which she retweeted with the hashtag #SleepWhereYouWork.
When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
Crawford, tweeted on Sunday that she was “deeply proud” of her team, as she criticised people who had jeered or mocked her achievements, although she did not confirm her departure directly.
Twitter’s premium subscription service had a troubled relaunch in November after some users took advantage of paying for a verified account by launching a slew of impersonator accounts. Nintendo, the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and the US politician Ted Cruz were among the firms and public figures who found themselves being impersonated by accounts with blue ticks.
Twitter Blue was relaunched again in December and, according to news site the Information, has 180,000 subscribers in the US compared with a global monthly user base of more than 250 million people. Musk has identified growth in subscription revenue as a key target for Twitter, which relied on advertising for the majority of its income prior to his takeover but has suffered a plunge in ad revenue because of issues including the impersonation problem.
The job losses have taken place against a backdrop of financial uncertainty at Twitter, a company that has been loss-making historically and has struggled to generate the cash flow required to pay off the significant debts it inherited after Musk’s $44bn (£36.7bn) takeover.
The deal’s financing included $13bn worth of debt that now sits on Twitter’s balance sheet and costs more than $1bn a year to service. Twitter made the first quarterly payment on that debt in January, but analysts have warned that Musk needs to turn round the business in order to make the debt sustainable in the long term.
Musk sacked half of Twitter’s workforce, about 3,750 people, within days of taking over the business and hundreds more left weeks later after the Tesla CEO demanded that staff commit to being “hardcore” or leave. Musk said in December that his cost-cutting drive meant Twitter was is “not on the fast lane to bankruptcy any more” but he has continued to take action on costs in 2023.
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