According to two people aware of the developments, the social media platform now has less than 10 people left in India. Twitter used to have 230 to 250 employees in the country, two people said.
According to Statista.com, the company has around 23.6 million users in India. In a counterclaim filed in court in Delaware during the fight to take over Twitter, Musk claimed that India is the company’s third largest market.
Affected employees have lost access to Twitter’s internal systems such as Slack, email and laptops.
A lawyer close to the company said some employees decided to tender their resignations fearing layoffs. The company had also fired some employees in September.
Another person close to the company confirmed that people from Twitter’s curation team, which curates content for the Twitter Moments feature, have been let go.
Other teams affected include communications, global content partnerships, sales and advertising revenue. All or at least 50% of the employees on these teams have been fired.
Notably, the engineering and product teams were truncated, although Twitter announced plans to expand its engineering team in India, which operates out of Bengaluru, as recently as April 2021.
It had appointed former Uber executive Apoorva Dalal as engineering director as part of the plan.
Among the fired employees, a former employee said that some contractual employees have been retained.
To be sure, the Twitter teams involved in the handling of India operations operate across continents, so some members were not directly in India.
Within India, Twitter has three offices- in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Mumbai.
Three people confirmed that two employees had been retained on the public policy team, while a fourth said that Twitter also barred some employees from the sale. Some contractors who were not on full-time Twitter roles have also been retained, as the former employee cited above said.
Employees have been told that details of the next steps, including the severance package and return of company assets, will be communicated in the next few days.
Most employees expect two months’ pay as severance, although this can vary depending on an individual’s terms of employment.
Reuters reported that Musk had instructed Twitter Inc’s teams to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion. As per the FY 2011 filing by Twitter with the Registrar of Companies (ROC), the company earned 43.25 crore in “Employee Benefit Expenditure”.
ROC filings were obtained from business research platform Toffler.
FY22 numbers were not available at press time.
The layoffs are part of a global downsizing drive that began after Musk took over the company.
Twitter employees globally have also started the hashtag #OneTeam on the platform to show solidarity with each other and announce their layoffs. The same hashtag is also racking up posts on the professional networking platform LinkedIn.
“Just missed. Bird App, it was an absolute honour, the greatest privilege ever to be part of this team, this culture,” tweeted Yash Agarwal, who was previously part of the public policy team at the company.
“It is an honor to be a part of this team and this organization. It gives me great gratitude to be able to call you guys my colleagues and my friends. It’s been an amazing ride,” wrote Shifalika Yogi, whose profile indicates she was a senior customer account manager at Twitter.
The first round of layoffs began on Twitter on Friday, following a formal email sent on Thursday that purportedly asked workers around the world to stay home and wait for another email that would give them their job status. Will update about
“In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce,” the first email said, Reuters reported on Friday.
According to a July report by Statista, Twitter employed about 7,500 people globally as of December 2021, up from 5,500 in the previous year.
Reports from Reuters and Bloomberg on Thursday said Musk planned to lay off half of the workforce at the firm.
After the $44 billion deal was completed last week, Musk fired top Twitter executives, including chief executive officer Parag Agarwal and chief financial officer Ned Sehgal, legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.
Several top executives, including chief marketing officer Leslie Berland, left the company following the sacking of top executives.
Abhijit Ahskar, Reuters and Bloomberg contributed to the story.
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