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What’s going on:
This weekend, Twitter parted ways with a minimum of 200 of its remaining 2,000 employees – about 10% of the company’s workforce, according to The New York Times.
As the new owner of the social media platform since October, Elon Musk has steadily cut back on costs by trimming the total number of employees from 7,500 down to 2,000.
Why it matters:
Following a week of obstructed communication between Twitter employees, the layoffs arrived. Last week, the company’s internal messaging service, Slack, had been switched off, which hindered workers’ ability to talk with each other or search for company data.
Saturday night brought the first sign of layoffs for some employees; they found that their corporate email accounts and laptops had been logged out. By Sunday morning, the magnitude of the dismissals was becoming evident. Farewells were posted on Twitter by those that had been laid off, and the remaining employees used encrypted messaging services verify who was still employed. In the evening, they were locked out of the Google chat service associated with their work emails.
The layoffs affected product managers, data scientists, and engineers who specialized in machine learning and site reliability; even the founders of the small tech companies acquired by Twitter in the past weren’t spared. This included Esther Crawford, the creator of Squad, a screen-sharing and video chat app.
How it’ll impact the future:
Last Saturday’s layoff was the biggest since November when Musk told his employees that there wouldn’t be any further job cuts. This came shortly after his decision to let go nearly half of Twitter’s workforce just a week after he had taken control of the company.
This round of layoffs might not be the last, and time will tell whether this will impact the future of the app, as well as the success of Twitter.
