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Twitter employees working in the Singapore office were walked out of the building by the owner due to some rent issues. The Singapore office also serves as the US firm’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, and it was reportedly being told to vacate the premises.
Casey Newton, who runs tech-focused platform Platformer, tweeted that Twitter workers were escorted out by the landlords of its 22,000-square-foot office in the city-state’s central business district.
A report from Bloomberg said that local staff was previously asked to clear their desks by January 11 and work from their respective homes from today until further notice.
A CapitaLand spokesperson, however, told Tech in Asia that Twitter remains a tenant of CapitaGreen but did not provide further details.
Since his $44 billion takeover of the social media company, Musk has been laying off workers and trying to run a tighter ship, even as hundreds may have resigned around the same time. While the new CEO is trying to save revenue, key Twitter departments and teams worldwide need help with the shortage of personnel.
News of Singapore’s Twitter workers comes days after an update that Twitter was closing its Seattle office, where employees were reportedly coming to work with their own toilet paper since janitor services had earlier been halted.
The Elon Musk-led company set up shop in Singapore in 2013. Twitter moved into a larger office in 2015, which it dubbed as its base in the Asia Pacific. In 2022, the company announced plans to further expand its Singapore presence by doubling its engineer headcount to over 100 by this year.
Twitter made further staff cuts in the trust and safety team handling global content moderation and in the unit related to hate speech and harassment a couple of days ago.
At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Those laid off at the social media platform owned by Elon Musk include Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, a relatively recent hire as head of site integrity for the Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy.
Workers on teams handling policy on misinformation, global appeals, and state media on the platform were also eliminated, the report added.
Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, confirmed to Reuters that Twitter made some cuts in the trust and safety team on Friday night but did not give details.
“We have thousands of people within Trust and Safety who work content moderation and have not made cuts to the teams that do that work daily,” she said via email.
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