Twitter by Elon Musk Fires Senior Lieutenant in Charge of Twitter Blue

On Saturday night, Twitter laid off around 200 employees, constituting roughly 10% of its remaining workforce. The social media platform was acquired by Elon Musk in October, and he has been reducing costs by downsizing the workforce from approximately 7,500 employees.

The layoffs coincided with a week of communication difficulties for Twitter employees. The internal messaging service, Slack, was offline, preventing employees from communicating with each other or accessing company data. Some employees discovered on Saturday night that they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, indicating that layoffs had begun.

By Sunday morning, it became clear that the cuts were widespread. Some employees used Twitter to post farewell messages, while remaining workers turned to encrypted messaging services like Signal to communicate. Additionally, the remaining employees lost access to a Google chat service linked to their work email accounts.

The layoffs affected product managers, data scientists, and engineers working on machine learning and site reliability to keep Twitter’s various features online. The monetization infrastructure team, responsible for Twitter’s revenue-generating services, was downsized from 30 people to fewer than eight.

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