Twitter layoffs: Around 200 employees fired by Elon Musk in fresh round of job cuts

Twitter has reportedly laid off about 10 per cent of its remaining workforce, or at least 200 employees, on Saturday night. The move comes as part of Elon Musk's ongoing effort to reduce costs since acquiring the social media platform in October. Twitter's workforce has already been cut down from about 7,500 employees to roughly 2,000.

According to a report by The New York Times, around three people familiar with the matter have confirmed that the Twitter workforce is smaller by 10 per cent. Earlier last week, another report by The Information claimed that Twitter had fired 50 peoples from the Sales and Products team. 

The new round of layoffs comes after a week in which Twitter made it difficult for employees to communicate with each other. Slack, the company's internal messaging service, was taken offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or looking up company data. Some employees discovered on Saturday night that they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops, which was the first hint that layoffs had begun.

The report suggests that by Sunday morning, it was clear that the scope of the cuts was significant. Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while remaining workers scrambled to use encrypted messaging services like Signal to determine who else was left. The fresh round of job cuts hit product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability.

The report also confirms that Elon Musk has fired Esther Crawford, who was responsible for Twitter Blue. She also gained popularity after a picture of her sleeping in the Twitter office was shared on the microblogging site. She was also considered to be in Musk's new circle on Twitter.    

Also read: Twitter employee who slept in office to complete work gets fired

Musk had told employees in late November that there were no more plans for staff reductions. However, the billionaire has continued to conducts mass layoffs leaving a fraction of Twitter's workforce.