Twitter Has Had 3 Rounds Of Layoffs Since Musk Said Staff Cuts Were Done: Report

Twitter has had at least three rounds of layoffs since owner Elon Musk said staff cuts were over at the social media company, a new report revealed. The company first laid off thousands of employees in November, followed by a reduction of its public policy team in December.

Dozens of employees in the engineering and sales departments lost their jobs last week, according to insiders and social media posts from laid-off employees tracked by The Verge. If the recent layoffs did occur, Twitter has gone through at least three rounds of layoffs since Musk announced in November that there would be no more staff reductions, the outlet reported.

Musk told employees during an all-hands meeting in November that the company was done with layoffs and had started actively recruiting new workers for engineering and sales, as per an earlier report from the outlet.

Former Twitter engineering manager Marcin Kadluczka noted in a post Sunday that he was thankful to have worked with the monetization infra team, adding that he believed the social media platform could "really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though)."

The Verge's Alex Heath said he had confirmed that the Tesla CEO implemented a one-week deadline for revamping Twitter's ad targeting to become more like Google's search ads before Kadluczka and others were laid off Friday.

Twitter first laid off 3,700 employees early in November. Days after the layoff announcement, a group of affected Twitter employees filed a lawsuit that accused the company of violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act).

Days before Christmas, Twitter once again reduced its workforce, specifically its public policy team, leaving the said unit with only about 15 workers. The team had more than 60 members before Musk took over, CNN reported.

Last month, it was revealed that the headcount of Twitter's working employees was only at around 1,300, as per internal records seen by CNBC. Furthermore, the company reportedly had fewer than 550 full-time engineers.

The outlet also claimed that there were around 1,400 non-working employees who were still getting their pay, but many of the said non-working individuals reportedly resigned after Musk asked employees to commit to a "hardcore" work setup.

Musk has since responded to the reports about less than 2,000 working employees at Twitter. "There are ~2,300 active, working employees at Twitter," he insisted. Before Musk acquired the company, it had around 7,500 employees.

Meanwhile, some employees who either left Twitter or were part of the layoffs after Musk's takeover have come together to launch potential rivals that could challenge the social media platform.

Among them is former Twitter human rights advisor Sarah Oh who joined Gabor Cselle in creating the short-form social network T2.

Alphonzo Terrell, former head of Twitter's social media handle, has also built a team of ex-Twitter employees to work on Spill, another potential alternative that Terrell said has 20,000 individuals on the waitlist.