Twitter, the American social media platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk, reportedly cut back over 200 employees on Saturday, accounting for nearly 10% of its overall staff of 2000 workers who were still enrolled with the organization.

Musk, who bought the social networking site in October, gradually reduced its personnel from its peak of 7,500 workers in an effort to cut costs.

Interestingly, the layoffs happened after the firm made it hard for Twitter staff to speak to each other for a week.

Employees at the firm claim that Slack, Twitter's internal messaging platform, was pulled offline, prohibiting employees from communicating or accessing corporate information.

Three of the people claimed that on Saturday evening, some staff members realized that they had been logged out of their work laptops and business e-mail accounts. This was the first indication that layoffs had started.

The size of the cutbacks was becoming apparent by Sunday morning.

Several Twitter workers used the site to write farewell notes, while others hurried to employ encrypted chat platforms including Signal to figure out who else was still working.

According to three individuals, the remaining workers were denied access to a Google chat service linked to their work e-mail addresses by Sunday night.

Product managers, data scientists, and engineers who managed machine learning as well as site reliability, which helps keep Twitter's many functions online, were among those affected by the layoffs.

As per sources, the staff responsible for maintaining the services through which Twitter generates revenue was downsized from 30 to less than eight.

A few founders of small technology firms that Twitter has acquired over the years were among those impacted by the cutbacks.

It has also been reported that several of the founders earned larger compensation packages as terms of their firms' acquisition, ultimately adding to the cost to lay them off as their shares and incentives are paid out.

Source credit: https://www.straitstimes.com/business/twitter-cuts-more-engineering-product-jobs-to-curb-costs