Seattle-based Twitter employees are among those being laid off amid widespread job cuts at the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk.
Seattle is Twitter’s second-largest engineering hub outside of the San Francisco headquarters. The company first set up shop in Seattle in 2012. There are around 400 employees based in the Seattle region, according to LinkedIn.
It’s unclear how many were cut this week. Several Seattle-based employees wrote on LinkedIn Friday that they were let go. More than 15 people based in Seattle were on a spreadsheet listing employees who were laid off.
About half of the company’s 7,500-person workforce was laid off Friday, according to The Verge, which reported that core engineering teams were part of the cuts. The New York Times described the layoffs as “haphazard” as some employees learned they were laid off when they could not access internal systems.
Arnaud Weber, vice president of engineering, said Friday that he was laid off. Weber is based in Spokane, Wash., according to his Twitter profile. “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked potential but I’m proud of what we accomplished,” he wrote.
According to a representative with the real estate firm JLL in Seattle, Twitter still has two floors of space at the Century Square building in Seattle as of earlier this month, and it is not currently being marketed for sublease.
Twitter’s cuts follow layoffs at several tech companies that are trying to trim expenses amid economic uncertainty and falling stock prices.
After months of legal battles spurred by his attempt to drop out of a planned purchase, Musk — the CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX — decided to go ahead with his deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion.
Since taking over last week, Musk has announced a series of plans to shake up the company and its product. He tweeted Friday that the company has “suffered a massive drop in revenue,” citing pressure from activist groups on advertisers.
We reached out to Twitter and will update if we hear back, though much of the communications team has reportedly been laid off.
