SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 9 (UPI) — Social media giant Twitter will begin laying off employees next week in an effort to dramatically slash the company’s growing spending, media reports said Friday.
Some analysts had speculated for weeks that Twitter might soon trim its staff, following an earnings report in July that showed the social media company’s costs and spending rose to $633 million in Q2 of 2015 — up nearly 40 percent from the same quarter last year.
News reports cited sources as saying the layoffs would likely affect all departments in the company.
It is likely the layoffs will mostly affect engineers — which account for about half of all Twitter employees, tech site Recode reported Friday.
Friday’s news comes just a few days after Twitter announced co-founder Jack Dorsey had been named as its permanent full-time chief executive.
Some analysts said they aren’t surprised by the news because they felt Twitter, which employs more than 4,100 people in 35 offices around the world, had become a bit too bloated.
“Twitter is clearly going through a transition, a new CEO, new products, and this restructuring is another avenue they will need to go down,” technology analyst Brian Blau said. “Reducing costs by reductions is always tough, but a better focus on execution and innovation will help them in the long run.”
“Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily,” Dorsey tweeted Monday.
“We’re working hard at Twitter to focus our roadmap on a few things we can make really great. And we’re strengthening our team along the way,” he said in another.
A Twitter representative declined to comment on reports of the impending layoffs, which could begin as early as Tuesday.
“We are not commenting on rumor and speculation,” the representative told Recode.
In further cutting costs, Twitter has also chosen to abandon plans to expand to a 100,000 square foot office building in San Francisco across the street from its world headquarters, the San Francisco Business Times reported earlier this week.
Shares of Twitter fell by as much as 4 percent in extended trading Friday, upon investors learning of the layoff reports.
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