Twitter reportedly lays off 200 more employees

Elon Musk’s Twitter has laid off at least 200 workers, or nearly 10% of the company’s workforce, as reported by The New York Times on Saturday.

According to the report, sources familiar with the matter said that the layoffs affected mainly product managers, engineers and data scientists who were working on site reliability and machine learning. 

The Information reported the same day that the company laid off 50 employees, and Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer tweeted on Sunday that Elon Musk loyalist and Twitter Blue Head Esther Crawford is also out.

One of the very first things Musk did after completing his $44 billion Twitter deal in late October was to lay off almost half of the company’s workforce, some of whom were reportedly asked to return shortly after. Before the newest round of layoffs, the company had around 2,300 active workers, Musk had said in a tweet last month.

To attract advertisers that have left the platform after the takeover, the company has also offered various ad incentives and eased its policies around political and cannabis ads. 

In addition, it also started requiring users to subscribe to its controversial Blue plan to have a verification badge and use features like tweet editing, longer character limit per tweet, and two factor authentication via SMS. It costs $8 if bought on the web and $11 on iOS & Android apps.

Its rival Meta, which is also reportedly set to lay off thousands of employees, introduced a similar subscription plan last week that costs $11.99 on the web and $14.99 on mobile.