Twitter’s Singapore office hit by layoffs amid wider job cuts

TWITTER employees worldwide waited nervously on Friday (Nov 4) to find out about 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, such as the engineering, sales and marketing.

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.

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

Twitter’s new owner, 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 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. THE STRAITS TIMES