Some 3,700 Twitter jobs reportedly cut by Musk

Layoffs would represent about half media platform’s workforce

SAN FRANCISCO — When the ax came down at Twitter on Friday, it did not fall smoothly.

The first sign that some of the company’s 7,500 employees had been laid off came when their email accounts were shut off late Thursday. Yet they received no official word about termination, and some of their Slack accounts still worked. In Twitter’s offices in Ireland and Britain, some employees learned they were unemployed in the middle of their night.

By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s workforce, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said.

The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company.

The layoffs leave Twitter significantly changed just over a week after Musk closed his blockbuster $44 billion buyout of the company. The actions raise questions about how the world’s richest man can carry out his ambitious plans for the social media service, which include new product features, boosting the number of users and finding other revenue streams.

Musk, 51, faces numerous challenges at

Twitter, which he has taken private. He is under financial pressure to make the deal work, having taken on $13 billion in debt for the buyout. Yet the company has lost money for eight of the past 10 years and faces a decline in digital advertising amid a slowing economy.

At the same time, some advertisers, which provide 90% of Twitter’s revenue, have paused their spending on the platform, citing fears over how the site’s content might change under Musk. That pullback accelerated Friday as advertisers such as the Volkswagen Group joined the growing boycott. Civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that loosening Twitter’s content rules might lead to a rise in toxic speech.

On Friday, Musk addressed Twitter’s layoffs while speaking at an investment conference in New York. He said the cuts were needed because “Twitter was having pretty serious revenue challenges and cost challenges” before the deal, which have been made worse by “activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter.”

He added that he had tried “every possible thing to appease” these activists and reiterated that he had not changed Twitter’s content rules.

Neither Twitter’s communications team, which was almost entirely laid off, nor Musk responded to requests for comment.

Musk already faces legal challenges from the layoffs. On Friday, five former Twitter workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for failing to give advance notice of the cuts.