Twitter Layoff Saga Hits Another Vertical As Chief Of Public Policy Departs: Report

After sacking hundreds of engineer last week, Twitter is now laying off employees in the public policy department.

Twitter layoff: Chaos at Twitter continues as the Elon-Musk led micro-blogging site is still under the reels of layoffs. Twitter Inc’s public policy chief, Sinead McSweeney, global Vice President for Public Policy has left the company amid additional layoffs to the unit on Thursday, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. His departure was not reported previously.

Twitter has laid off more employees from its remaining public policy team, after laying off an unknown number of engineers in its infrastructure vertical last week. The public policy team is responsible for interacting with lawmakers and civil society on issues including free speech, privacy and online safety.

‘Yesterday was my last day at Twitter….’

A member of the Twitter public policy team tweeted late on Thursday that she has been laid off.

“Yesterday was my last day at Twitter, as half of the remaining Public Policy team was cut from the company. It’s hard to convey how fortunate I feel to have had this exceptional opportunity. This was, indeed, a dream job,” posted Theodora (Theo) Skeadas.

According to a report by IANS,  Musk’s  Twitter now has just over 2,000 employees (it had more than 7,500 employees when he took over in October.

Apart from this, Musk has is recently making the headlines on the issue of cost cutting. According to news agency AFP, the mercurial billionaire told a live chat forum that without the changes, including firing over half of Twitter’s employees, the company would have bled $3 billion dollars a year.

“Not good since Twitter has $1 billion in cash. That’s why I spent the past five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he told Twitter Spaces, a feature of the platform he bought for $44 billion. “If… you’re looking at it from my standpoint… basically, you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” he said.

The company has been hit by at least 100 former employees of various legal violations, including gender discrimination in layoffs and failing to pay promised severance. Twitter laid off around 3,700 employees in early November in the first cost-cutting measure. Hundreds more resigned later.

The company was also sued in the US for mass layoffs without giving employees advance written notice.