Twitter Guts Key India Workforce By 90% Post Musk Takeover

Twitter Inc fired more than 90% of its staff in India over the weekend due to global reductions by the new owner and Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk.
The downsizing severely depleted its engineering and product staff in a potential growth market, Bloomberg reports.
Twitter employed just over 200 people in India, and the cuts left it with just about a dozen staff.
India is a crucial growth engine for global internet companies like Twitter, Meta Platforms Inc META, and Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Google, thanks to its immense potential pool of new online users. Yet the companies were also vulnerable to strict content regulations aimed at reining in big tech firms in the country.
About 70% of the jobs cut in India were from the product and engineering team, which worked on a global mandate.
Twitter slashed positions across functions, including marketing, public policy, and corporate communications.
Globally, San Francisco, California-based Twitter reduced its headcount by about half, or roughly 3,700 workers.
India has one of the most febrile political conversations on Twitter, with competing parties regularly slinging allegations and accusing each other of spreading misinformation.
Musk has ordered Twitter’s teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings raising concerns that Twitter could go down during high-traffic events like the U.S. midterm elections.