By Sam Boughedda
Twitter laid off at least 200 employees, or around 10% of its workforce, on Saturday night, the New York Times reported Monday.
Citing three people familiar with the matter, the publication states Twitter's workforce is now below 2,000, down from 7,500 when Elon Musk took over the company in October.
In an effort to significantly reduce costs, Elon Musk has steadily reduced Twitter's workforce. The NYT adds that five current and former employees told them the layoffs come a week after Twitter made it difficult for employees to communicate with each other, with its internal messaging service, Slack, taken offline.
As a result, three of the people said that on Saturday night, some employees found they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, and by Sunday morning, "the scope of the cuts was becoming clear."
The report also claims that workers who kept their jobs used encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine who else was left. The cuts are said to have impacted data scientists, product managers, and engineers who had worked on machine learning and site reliability.
In addition, the monetization infrastructure team was cut to less than eight people from 30, a person familiar with the matter told the NYT, while the layoffs affected several founders of small tech companies that Twitter had acquired over recent years, including Esther Crawford, who founded screen-sharing and video chat app Squad and Haraldur Thorleifsson, the creator of design studio Ueno.
In November, Twitter eliminated about half of its workforce a week into Musk's ownership of the company, while smaller layoffs and resignations had reduced the social media company's staff to around 2,000.