‘Twitter has about 300 employees in India, out of whom 250 have been laid off’.
New Delhi: The microblogging social media platform Twitter has begun a massive layoffs across the globe since Friday which has affected about 250 employees of Twitter in India. According to sources within Twitter India, the entire team of media communication, marketing and some from the engineering department has been asked to go. In a formal email sent by Twitter on Friday evening (IST), these employees have been informed that their employment with Twitter has been terminated and that their official email ID, slack and other officially accessible applications and database have been frozen by the company and they would not have access to them any further.
Sources from Twitter India said that following a “bloodbath” in the media communications and marketing team, the company has retained some employees from the sales and marketing department in India. Twitter has about 300 employees in India, out of whom 250 have been laid off in a global layoff spree that the company has undertaken following the takeover of the company by billionaire and head of Tesla Elon Musk.
According to multiple sources, Twitter has laid off almost 85% of its workforce in India and about 90% of its workforce in Asia. Globally, the social media platform has laid off almost 3,700 of its employees, affecting about 50% of the total workforce at Twitter. The company has about 7,000 employees around the world. Justifying the layoffs from Twitter, Elon Musk on Saturday said through Twitter, “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4 million every day.”
Musk also announced that all those who have been fired from the company has been offered three months’ severance package, “which is 50% more than legally required”, Musk said.
The Sunday Guardian had reached out to the global Press team of Twitter for seeking an official response on the layoffs by the company in India and how Twitter, going ahead, would restructure its organisation in India. However, this newspaper did not receive any response till the time this story went to press.
According to multiple reports and social media posts, the mass global firing at Twitter has affected departments like the media, communications, policy, the curation team, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, and even some from the core engineering team. This move has been taken by Musk to cut down on the cost that the company had been bearing over the years. Musk was unhappy with the earlier team led by Parag Agarwal, the erstwhile CEO of Twitter. Musk believes that Parag and his team had misled him during the negotiation period that was underway when the deal was being struck between Twitter and Musk earlier this year.
Remember, soon after the takeover of Twitter by Musk last month through a $44 billion deal, he announced that Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal, along with the CFO and head of Twitter policy and legal, Vijaya Gadde were sacked. On Friday, globally several of the employees of Twitter had lost access to their official emails like what happened to several Twitter employees in India. Twitter also announced that the office of Twitter, called the Birdhouse, would be shut till Monday and all access to internal directories and applications would be disabled to protect data security and to avoid data breach.
Many employees of Twitter complained on Twitter about how they have been laid off without a “due process”. Some employees of the company from the UK claimed that they had received emails about their lay-off on their personal email ID as late as 3 am (UK time) in the morning. Twitter on Thursday had announced that many of its employees would be laid off and that all those laid off would be informed in their personal email IDs, while the ones retained will get emails on their official email ID.