Twitter stealthily lays off 10% of remaining workers, including tech staff

About 10% of embattled social media giant Twitter’s remaining workforce, including staff charged with keeping the platform functional, discovered that they had been laid off over the weekend, according to a report published Sunday by the New York Times.

About 200 data scientists, product managers and engineers working on issues like site reliability were among those fired, days after the company took some of its internal communications infrastructure offline, according to the report. These cuts are the latest of several that have afflicted Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover in late 2022. Fewer than 2,000 employees still work at Twitter, out of roughly 7,500 who were present before the company’s go-private deal.

The Times report said that the company had shuttered its Slack instance early last week, which made it harder for employees to communicate with one another, and that some employees only discovered that they had been laid off when they were logged out of Twitter’s systems, including email accounts and laptops. Additionally, a Google chat platform administered by the company for its employees was closed over the weekend.

Esther Crawford, the head of Twitter Blue — the company’s verification service that had begun efforts to charge users a monthly fee for the coveted “blue checkmark” on their profiles — was among those ousted in the latest round of layoffs, according to widespread reports. Crawford was the founder of a social screen-sharing app called Squad, which was bought out by Twitter in 2020 for an undisclosed fee.

Soon after Musk’s takeover, he implemented large-scale layoffs that, in some cases, affected entire departments. Several further rounds of layoffs have occurred since, and many more employees have left the company after the billionaire emerald mine heir issued an ultimatum to remaining staff, saying that they would need to work in an “extremely hardcore” way to continue.

A request for comment sent to Twitter received no response as of this article’s publication.

The Twitter layoffs come as tech companies, facing an uncertain global economy and slowing revenue growth, have picked up the pace of layoffs this year. After going on a hiring binge during the pandemic when lockdowns sparked a move to remote work and an uptick in e-commerce and online communications, they now face revenue declines.