UPDATED 22:50 EST / OCTOBER 24 2016

NEWS

Twitter’s woes continue as report says 300+ staff about to be laid off

Twitter Inc. may lay off as many as 300 people this week in the wake of a failed attempt to find a buyer, according to a new report.

The job cuts were reported by Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources. The social media platform will lose around 8 percent of its total workforce of 3,860 employees, almost the same percentage as it lost last year when cofounder Jack Dorsey took the reins as chief executive. Bloomberg said that “planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change.”

Twitter won’t reveal whether its revenue growth will continue to slow until Oct. 27, when it reports its second-quarter earnings. But it’s struggling to turn itself around as user growth has slowed and it’s not clear what revenue plans would satisfy investors who had hoped Twitter could emulate Facebook Inc.’s huge success. The company’s shares recently plummeted following a series of rebuffs by potential buyers.

Salesforce.com Inc. CEO Mark Benioff, Twitter’s apparent last hope for a near-term acquisition, said earlier this month that Twitter “wasn’t the right fit for us.” That followed a string of other rumored acquirers, such as Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. parent Alphabet Inc. and Walt Disney Co., that didn’t pan out.

The question remains whether Dorsey can turn the company around. In spite of the company’s 313 million active users, growth of new users has stagnated, unlike other social media companies such as Facebook and Snap Inc. Twitter’s bottom line is also something that might turn potential buyers away. Despite the fact the platform has one of the most noticeable brands in the world (according to Twitter, 90 percent of the computer using world knows the brand), it has notorious revenue problems.

In short, Twitter seems to have an identity crisis. It knows not what precisely it is, and neither do its users. This year the company has tried to address this issue by reinvigorating its marketing strategy, telling the world it is the go-to social media platform for live news, events and sports results.

Twitter will release its quarterly earnings report at 4 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, a change in time from about 1 p.m. Pacific Time after the stock market closes. This has led to a fair amount of speculation, though it seems likely it wanted to avoid coming out at the same time as earnings from Alphabet and Amazon.com Inc.

Photo credit: Andreas Eldh via Flickr

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