SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter is laying off up to 336 employees, signaling CEO Jack Dorsey’s resolve to slash costs while the company struggles to make money.
The cutbacks announced Tuesday could equate to about 8 percent of Twitter’s workforce of 4,100 people.
The purge comes two weeks after Twitter brought back one of its co-founders as permanent CEO in hopes that Dorsey would be able to resolve problems that have slowed user growth at the messaging service and compounded an uninterrupted cycle of financial losses.
Cutting costs can boost profits but at Twitter, it has also raised uncertainty about the future, the company’s pursuit of faster growth and its ability to attract a bigger audience.
Dorsey told Twitter employees in a Tuesday letter that a more streamlined company will result in more products rolling out more quickly. “We feel strongly that engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team,” Dorsey wrote.
Twitter’s workforce has nearly doubled over the past two years, hindering efforts to turn a profit for the first time in its nine-year history. Since Dorsey and his partners started the service, Twitter has lost nearly $2 billion.
When reports of the anticipated layoffs surfaced late last week, investors initially fretted that Dorsey might be reacting to disappointing performance in the quarter that just ended in September. Twitter eased those worries Tuesday by disclosing that its revenue for the period will hit or slightly exceed its previous target of $545 million to $560 million. The official results are due out Oct. 27.
