Twitter is planning to cut as much as 8 percent of its staff this week
Twitter CEO Jack DorseyBill Pugliano/Getty
Twitter is planning a big round of layoffs that could affect up to 8% of its staff, or 300 people, according to a Bloomberg reportciting anonymous sources.
The layoffs come as the money-losing social networking company continues to struggle to grow its audience and its business, and as plans to sell the company appear to have foundered.
The job cuts could be announced this week, perhaps before its third-quarter earnings report which will be released before the market opens on Thursday, Bloomberg said.
Shares of Twitter, which are down more than 40% from their 52-week high, were essentially unchanged in after hours trading on Monday.
Deal problems
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is increasingly under the gun. The Twitter cofounder is doing double duty as CEO of mobile payment company Square as well as Twitter, raising criticisms that the 39-year old tech entrepreneur is not able to devote sufficient time and energy to turning Twitter around.
Since taking over as Twitter CEO last year, Dorsey has already initiated one round of job cuts. But he has been unable to grow Twitter's audience, which stalled at around 300 million users, even as larger companies like Facebook continue to amass millions of new users.
Twitter has put itself on the auction block, but so far, no one seems to want it. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who had deal talks with Twitter, said that he was forced to walk away from the deal table after his shareholders protested.
Other potential buyers, including Walt Disney and Google's parent company Alphabet, also reportedly looked at the company and passed. The latest rumor is that Softbank is kicking the tires on an acquisition, though there doesn't seem to be any real evidence of a deal.
Earlier on Monday Twitter raised eyebrows with a last-minute rescheduling of its third-quarter earnings report. Instead of announcing its results after market close on Thursday, as it had originally planned, the company said it would report its results at 4am Pacific Time, before the market opens — a highly unusual move for tech companies based on the West Coast.
Twitter declined to comment.
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