Twitter employees lose their jobs as company halts global engineering work

A Twitter spokesperson revealed that Twitter would be laying off employees and halting work at one of its development centres in India's technology hub Bengaluru.

"As part of our normal business review, we have decided to stop the global engineering work at the Bangalore development center. We thank the impacted individuals for their valuable contributions and are doing as much as we can to provide them a respectful exit from our company," the spokesperson said.

The company spokesperson further said this move would only affect its global engineering workforce in Bengaluru but declined to disclose any specific details on the number of jobs being cut or how are they helping the affected employees.

However, the layoffs are likely to impact less than 20 employees at the development centre, according to another source familiar with the matter. The affected employees were reportedly a part of ZipDial, an Indian mobile communications startup bought by Twitter last year.

The move of sacking these employees comes a year after Twitter had announced plans of doubling down on its India operations in June last year, to build localised products suitable for markets with pervasive Internet connectivity issues. It had also stated that it would increase its employee strength to 50 employees.

Back then, Twitter's global vice-president for product management Christian Oestlien who is now at Google's YouTube said that India will act as a centre to develop local language products for non-English speaking countries like in Asia and Latin America.

"To begin with, the India engineering centre will focus on three things -build product that are unique and distinct to Indian market, appeals to local traditions customs and interests. Second, to make sure our app performs in a world-class manner, regardless of internet connection, and finally, to make sure it's accessible regardless of the device people are using, language they speak, income or location," Oestlien had said at the time.

Twitter, however, said it remained committed to India as a strategic market for users, partners and advertisers and would continue to maintain a presence in the city.

The company's defense comes as damage mitigation as this move comes amid rumors of a Twitter takeover, after struggling with sluggish revenue growth and a stagnant user base for several quarters.

In July, Twitter reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth since going public in 2013 and also provided a disappointing forecast. Earlier this week, a Twitter investor had also sued the microblogging giant over claims that they had misled investors on key growth metrics, including user base and user engagement.

(With inputs from Reuters)