Twitter laid off over 50 of its employees during the weekend. According to The Information and social media post from former employees, this is the eighth round of layoffs since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022.
This layoff began when these affected employees discovered they couldn’t communicate with one another on the Slack Platform. TechCrunch said the platform was down because Twitter had not paid its Slack bill on time.
However, this was the first indication that a layoff was on the way for many. Some employees discovered on Saturday night that they had already been logged out of their corporate email accounts, and that was the end of the road for them.
Read Also: Fresh headache for Twitter employees as Elon Musk ends remote work in 1st email
Over 50 Twitter employees affected
The layoffs affected the company’s various divisions, including sales, human resources, engineering, finance, and project management. According to The Information, this round of layoffs occurred just a few days after the microblogging site let go of its ad sales staff.
Ms Esther Crawford, the founder of Squad and the chief executive of Twitter payments who supervised the company’s Blue verification subscription, was among those affected this time.
Mr Haraldur Thorleifsson, the founder of design studio Ueno, which the microblogging site acquired in 2021, and Martijin de Kuijper, senior product manager and founder of Revue, an editorial newsletter tool acquired by Twitter in 2021, were both logged out of their company email accounts.
According to The Straits Times, the monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which the microblogging site makes money, has been reduced from 30 to fewer than eight people.
It is unknown what the severance packages will be for these affected employees because Twitter has not yet issued an official statement about the layoff.
However, these founders might receive higher compensation packages as part of their companies’ acquisitions, making it potentially more expensive to lay them off. Many of the affected employees have posted farewell messages on the microblogging platform.
Read Also: Why Elon Musk is preparing to delete 1.5 billion Twitter accounts
Elon Musk previously laid off top employees
Just after the acquisition in October, billionaire Elon Musk has steadily pared back its workforce from about 7,500 employees as he sought to reduce costs.
On his first at the office, the billionaire fired several of the company’s senior executives following the closure of his recent transaction. Among those recently fired are the CEO, Parag Agrawal; the CFO, Ned Segal; the Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde; and the General Counsel, Sean Edgett.
Read Also: Finally, Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44bn, fires CEO and CFO