Despite already making several rounds of extreme cuts, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has laid off even more employees this weekend.
Tech website The Information first reported the company had laid off at least 50 people Saturday. The cuts were reportedly across different departments, including ad tech and technical infrastructure teams that help keep the site up and running.
Zoë Schiffer, managing editor at Platformer, tweeted that they heard the cuts were “well above” 50 people and that the engineering team was hit by the layoffs. That’s of particular concern, considering Twitter has been increasingly glitchy and unreliable while being run by the skeleton crew remaining after Musk’s massive cuts.
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Musk has laid off thousands of people since he paid $44 billion for Twitter. At least 70 percent of the previous staff is gone. The latest layoffs, The Information reported, are an apparent attempt to cuts costs amid a plunge in revenue under Musk’s leadership.
It’s been one cost-cutting measure after the next for Musk’s Twitter. Mashable’s Matt Binder wrote about how Twitter’s slowly degrading performance under all the penny-pinching, including the sudden loss of internal tools like Slack, the messaging platform.
The latest layoffs happened unexpectedly on Saturday and are the fourth set of layoffs to happen since Musk took over in October last year. New York Times reporter Kate Conger tweeted that, “some Twitter engineers are being locked out of their work emails and laptops tonight” and pieced together that it was a layoff. Schiffer, from Platformer, tweeted that the layoffs were especially surprising because it included folks they described as “hardcore Musk loyalists.”
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Musk, meanwhile, kept shit-posting on Twitter as the layoffs went down. He retweeted a positive review of Woody Harrelson’s anti-vax SNL monologue, quote-tweeted a Babylon Bee tweet, and posted dumb memes that looked like they were ripped from Facebook. Also whatever this is.
Just another chaotic day for Musk’s Twitter.
