Twitter has continued on its firing spree days after laying off 3,700 employees globally, following the acquisition of the company by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The focus has now been shifted to India where more than 90% of its staff has been reportedly fired over the weekend, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The report, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the cuts have left just about a dozen staff out of more than the 200 Twitter has in India. Musk said he is trimming Twitter’s workforce because of cost. He said the social media “company is losing over $4M/day,” leaving him with no choice than to downsize.
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Following the completion of Twitter acquisition by Musk, India – a huge internet market that has recently become key to growth for American tech giants, said last month it expects Twitter to comply with the country’s new IT rules and local laws.
“Our rules and laws for intermediaries remain the same regardless of who owns the platforms,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology. “So, the expectation of compliance with Indian laws and rules remains.”
India has been in a faceoff with Twitter over compliance with the country’s regulatory policies deemed stringent. The jobs cut spell uncertainty in India-Twitter relationship.
The report said about 70% of the jobs cut in India were from the product and engineering team which worked on a global mandate. Positions were also slashed across functions including marketing, public policy and corporate communications, according to the people with the knowledge of the matter.
Twitter’s office in Accra, Ghana, is another place where employees’ layoff has taken place. The office, which was set up in April 2021 as Twitter headquarters in Africa, has about 20 workers. About 10 of them are believed to have been impacted by the change.
https://twitter.com/mistameister/status/1588440735527112705?s=20&t=u9zN54ltKPui6-YQCweExQ
However, Musk is calling some of the fired employees back to help in developing new features of the app. It’s not clear if that will be the case with Twitter staff laid off outside San Francisco.
Twitter’s India offices are located in New Delhi, the financial capital of Mumbai and the southern tech hub of Bengaluru. Leaving only about 10 workers in the country – which is said to have the most febrile political conversations on Twitter – with competing parties regularly pointing fingers and accusing each other of spreading misinformation, opens a new content moderation challenge for Twitter and India.
With about 25 million users who spoke more than 100 different languages, leaving both engineering and content moderation jobs in the care of 10 employees, Twitter has picked a fresh fight in one of its biggest markets.