Twitter lays off staff in Singapore

SINGAPORE - Twitter employees worldwide waited nervously on Friday to find out their fate through an e-mail as job cuts swept across the social media company.

Those from the Singapore office were not spared. The Straits Times understands that job cuts spanned various teams, including the engineering, sales and marketing teams.

A Singapore employee who declined to be named described the mood since a week ago as one of great fear and uncertainty.

“We kept dismissing these rumours due to the lack of official communication until the e-mails came in this morning,” the employee said.

“This was especially so when the C-suites got fired or resigned, resulting in a lack of top-level management to disseminate information to the rest of the employees.”

In an internal e-mail on Friday morning seen by ST, the company said the cuts are “an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path”.

A second e-mail later notified employees of their fate.

Those who get to keep their jobs received a notification via their work e-mail. But those who are being let go were notified of the next steps in their private e-mail.

It is unclear how many Singapore employees were laid off.

On social media, employees were also seen tweeting using the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked and a saluting emoji to say they are leaving.

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Twitter’s new owner, Mr Elon Musk, plans to eliminate about 3,700 jobs, or half of the company’s global workforce, in a bid to drive down costs following his US$44 billion (S$62.3 billion) acquisition, said a Bloomberg report.

The entrepreneur had begun dropping hints about his staffing priorities before the deal closed, saying he wanted to focus on the core product. “Software engineering, server operations & design will rule the roost,” he tweeted in early October.

On Thursday, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Twitter in San Francisco’s federal court over the layoff plan, which workers say violates federal and California laws as employees were not given enough notice.

Twitter employees have been bracing themselves for layoffs since Mr Musk took over the company in late October.

He had earlier ousted most of the top executives, including chief executive Parag Agrawal, finance chief Ned Segal and senior legal executives Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett.

Mr Musk has anointed himself “Chief Twit” in his biodata on the social network. Bloomberg reported earlier that he would take on the role of interim CEO.

Things had looked rosy for the company earlier this year. It was reported in January 2022 that the company would double the number of engineers at its engineering hub in Singapore to more than 100 by the end of 2023.

The Twitter layoffs are among a spate of retrenchments amid a hiring slowdown in the tech industry.

Digital payments firm Stripe announced on Thursday that it would cut its workforce by 14 per cent. After the job cuts, Stripe will have about 7,000 employees, according to an e-mail to staff from founders Patrick and John Collison.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.