Roving Periscope: Shake-up disrupts disrupters like Twitter, Facebook
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Until recently, we saw them, even dreaded, as great socio-political and economic disrupters worldwide. Now they are facing disruption themselves!
Twitter has laid off half of its workforce—and, realizing a ‘mistake’, it is now recalling many of them!—while Facebook’s parent company Meta is preparing a large-scale layoff of its employees in what many view as the beginning of a disruptive churning in the world’s social media ecosystem.
Interestingly, Twitter Inc., which sacked nearly half of its 7,500 employees worldwide on Friday last week, is now reaching out to many of them asking them to return as they were laid off by ‘mistake’, the media reported on Monday.
In some other cases, the microblogging platform, acquired by the world’s wealthiest person Elon Musk for USD 44 billion, realized that it still required the sacked employees’ work and experience to build new features its new owner envisions—and tried calling them back.
Days after Musk took control of Twitter, it sacked close to 3,700 people via email to trim costs. The platform even asked some to return home midway if they were on their way to the office! Others learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The requests for employees to return show how rushed and chaotic the process was.
“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted on Friday last, trying to justify the massive sacking.
Now, Musk is reportedly pushing those still in his Twitter tent to move quickly in producing new features, and sometimes, employees have even slept at the office to meet new deadlines, after they were ordered to work 16 hours daily, seven days a week, to achieve their targets.
Over the last weekend, Twitter rolled out a new Twitter Blue subscription plan, offering a verification check mark for any user paying USD 8 per month. The company also said it will soon launch other features, including half the ads, the ability to post longer videos and get priority ranking in replies, mentions, and searches.
Facebook is also following a similar route. Its parent Meta is preparing for large-scale layoffs this week, the media reported.
Meta Platforms Inc might begin large-scale layoffs this week that will affect thousands of employees, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday, adding their termination could be announced on Wednesday.
In October, Meta forecasted a weak holiday quarter and significantly more costs next year wiping about USD 67 billion off Meta’s stock market value. This added over half a trillion US dollars in value already lost this year.
This happened when Meta is struggling with slowing global economic growth, competition from TikTok, privacy changes from Apple, concerns about massive spending on the metaverse, and the threat of regulation.
Its CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected the metaverse investments to take about a decade to bear fruit. In the meantime, he had to freeze hiring, shutter projects, and reorganize teams to trim costs.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a few high-priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today,” he said in October.
The social media behemoth had in June decided to cut hiring engineers by at least 30 percent, with Zuckerberg warning employees to brace for an economic downturn.
Several technology companies, including Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc, and Snap Inc have cut jobs and scaled back hiring in recent months as global economic growth slows because of higher interest rates, rising inflation, and an energy crisis in Europe.
