According to reports, at least 200 Twitter employees were laid off on Saturday night, representing 10% of the approximately 2,000 employees still employed by the company.
In an effort to save costs, Elon Musk, who bought the social media site in October, has gradually reduced its workforce of approximately 7,500 workers. The layoffs came after the company made it difficult for Twitter employees to communicate with one another for a week.
According to reports, the company’s internal messaging service, Slack, was taken offline, preventing employees from chatting with one another or looking up company data. Some employees said they discovered they were logged out of their corporate email accounts and laptops on Saturday night, the first sign that layoffs had begun.
The extent of the cuts was becoming clear by Sunday morning. Some Twitter employees used the platform to post farewell messages, while others scrambled to use encrypted messaging services to figure out who else was still working.
Three people said that by Saturday night, the remaining employees had also lost access to a Google chat service associated with their work email accounts.
Product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online, were among those affected by the layoffs. The monetization infrastructure team, which maintains the services through which Twitter makes money, was reduced from 30 to fewer than eight people.