In the latest – eight round – job cuts wave since Elon Musk took over the company in late October, this time targeting multiple engineering teams, social media platform Twitter laid off at least 50 employees on Saturday.
The US technology-focused publication The Information said in a report on Sunday that the latest job cuts, which impacted teams supporting advertising technology, the technical infrastructure to keep systems up and running the main Twitter app, aim to further whittle down a staff that had shrunk by at least 70% to roughly 2,000 as well as to offset a plunge in revenue following Musk’s $44 billion takeover.
As advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation, Twitter was experiencing a massive drop in revenue, according to Musk’s statement back in November, adding that advertisers are pulling due to activist groups’ pressuring even though the service has changed nothing within content moderation.
Citing internal records it had seen, CNBC reported last month that Twitter has shed about 80 percent – or more than 3,000 jobs – of its employees since Musk took over last year and that about 75 of the company’s 1,300 employees – including about 40 engineers – are on leave.
Musk refused those reports, arguing that there are about 2,300 active-working employees at Twitter and added that, unfortunately, he had no other choice when the company is losing over $4 million a day and advertisers are fleeing the microblogging platform.
In a cost-cutting measure, Twitter laid off about 3,700 employees in November at a time when growing fears of a recession in the world’s largest economy and rising interest rates resulted in tens of thousands of jobs being cut in the technology sector in recent months.
As part of a cost-cutting exercise, Twitter recently auctioned more than 600 items in an auction held by Heritage Global Partners, including a bird logo statue from Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, which was sold for $100,000.
The San Francisco-based company also launched the Twitter Blue subscription service, which allows users to get a blue tick account verification, edit tweets, and upload 1080p videos in exchange for a monthly fee.
After boosting hiring at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, tech giants such as Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s parent Alphabet have all axed staff, followed by Spotify, IBM, Disney, PayPal, and Dell in recent weeks.
Be the first to comment