CEO of Twitter Elon Musk has further downsized the company’s workforce, after he was reported to have laid of more than 50 employees last week.
The cuts were reportedly across departments, including ad tech and technical infrastructure teams that help to keep the platform up and running.
According to Zoe Schiffer who covers the company for platformer, via her Twitter handle disclosed that the layoffs came with lot of surprises, noting that it included hardcore Musk loyalists.
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Wow the layoffs last night included a ton of surprises. Hardcore Musk loyalists (more on that soon…) and the founder of the newsletter platform Revue that Twitter acquired in 2021. https://t.co/zO06QbhNpn
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 26, 2023
She wrote, “Wow the layoffs last night included a ton of surprises. Hardcore Musk loyalists (more on that soon…) and the founder of the newsletter platform Revue that Twitter acquired in 2021.”
Also, some affected employees took to Twitter to disclose that they discovered they have been sacked when they could not access the company’s communication platform, Slack.
A senior product manager Martijn de Kuijper via his Twitter handle, disclosed that he got to know about his sack after being locked out of his email account. He wrote, “Waking up to find I’ve being locked out of my email. Looks like i’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over”.
The recent layoff of workers is reported to be the fourth set of layoffs being carried out at Twitter since Musk took over the company in October 2022. The company’s headcount is reported to have fallen by over 70% and its chief source of revenue, advertising has fallen significantly.
Before acquiring Twitter and becoming its CEO, Elon Musk reportedly told investors he planned to slash the company’s staff by about 75%. Though he later denied that plan, but eventually went ahead to drastically reduce the company’s workforce.
More than 3,000 employees were slashed in the first round of the company’s mass layoffs on November 4. The platform at the end of October 2022, had lost more than an estimated three-quarters of its staff to layoffs and voluntary departures.
Meanwhile Twitter seems not to be the only tech company that has further downsized its workforce. Social media giant Meta is also set to further trim its workforce after cutting 11,000 jobs last year. Meta’s proposed job cuts is coming after Mark Zuckerberg had earlier assured workers that he wasn’t anticipating any more layoffs.
According to a recent report, the layoffs of tech workers in the opening two months of 2023 have surpassed the number of tech layoffs for the whole of last year.
Statistics reveal that in 2023, over 108,000 tech workers have been laid off so far, which represents 67.2% of the total amount of tech layoffs recorded in the whole of last year, which is about 160,997. With no sign of a slowdown in the current economic factors, there are possibilities that more tech companies will lay off their workforce.