Elon Musk sacks 200 more Twitter staff in latest round of cuts

Twitter has laid off another 200 employees, around 10 percent of its remaining workforce, in the latest round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over last October. 

 The layoffs, announced Saturday, bring Twitter’s workforce down to under 2,000 – a sharp fall from the 7,500 employed when the billionaire first took over. 

 On Sunday, Musk Tweeted: ‘Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life.’ Saturday’s cuts targeted product managers, data scientists and engineers and include product manager and Musk devotee Esther Crawford who led the launch of paid subscription service Twitter Blue.

 Crawford famously backed Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter 2.0 culture when he first took over, and was pictured on the office floor in a sleeping bag with a sleeping mask in November 2022. 

Twitter user Richard Heart responded to Musk’s post, saying: ‘Except for those where today is their last.’ The layoffs impacted the largest number of people at the company since half the company was laid off in November last year.

 Employees discovered they were set to lose their jobs after they found themselves unable to log in to their emails and work computers. Musk told employees during a meeting in late November that no more plans for staff reductions were being made. 

 But staff suspected another wave of cuts was coming this month after they suddenly lost access to their Slack channel last week. On Saturday night, some found they had been logged out of their emails and laptops. 

 The latest cuts primarily hit product managers including Crawford, as well as data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, according to the New York Times. Staff took to an anonymous platform for verified workers to detail the cuts as they unfolded at the weekend. 

 ‘People receive email at 2am on Saturday and access cut immediately. This will go down as one of the most extreme layoff in entire corporate history,’ read a post on Blind. 

 The poster claimed layoffs hit the project management department the hardest and were spread across human relations, sales and marketing, engineering and finance. Crawford, who before joining Twitter founded a small screen-sharing and video chat app called Squad, which Twitter acquired in 2020, was among those laid off.

 Haraldur Thorleifsson, who created the design studio Ueno, which the company bought in 2021, was also removed from his position at Twitter.

 Martijn de Kuijper, a senior project manager, said he found out about lay off after being locked out of his email account. 

 The dismissal of much of the product team has led some to speculate that Musk is preparing to bring in entirely new teams.