Twitter lays off another 50 employees to cut costs

Twitter is said to have laid off at least 50 employees in yet another effort to cut costs as advertising revenue continues to fall.

The layoffs announced over the weekend were the company’s second since Elon Musk took over in October 2022.

According to The Information, the latest cuts affected multiple engineering teams, including those supporting advertising technology, the main Twitter app, and technical infrastructure to keep Twitter’s systems up and running.

Since Elon Musk took over, Twitter’s staff strength is said to have shrunk by at least 70% as the first round of layoffs implemented by Musk affected about 3,700 employees of the company.

According to reports and posts by affected employees, many of the affected Twitter staff realised they had been sacked when they could not access the company’s communication platform, Slack.  

• “Slack is gone so no one knows what is going on. People receive an email at 2 am on Saturday and access is cut immediately. This will go down as one of the most extreme layoffs in entire corporate history,” reads one post on Blind, an anonymous platform for verified workers. 

The post went on to detail the extent of the layoffs: 50% in human relations, 60% in sales and marketing, 35% in engineering, 40% in finance, and 80% in project management. Employees have received one month’s severance, the poster said. However, Twitter has not released any official statement on the latest layoffs. 

The Information’s report also noted that Twitter kicked off this round of layoffs by letting go of its ad sales staff on February 17. 

A senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he found out about his lack of a job after being locked out of his email account. 

• “Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over,” tweeted de Kuijper.