Twitter has less than 550 full-time engineers

Twitter’s full-time workforce has shrunk to about 1,300 active and active employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers per title, according to internal records seen by CNBC. Around 75 of the company’s 1,300 employees are on leave, including around 40 engineers.

The company’s trust and safety team, which makes policy recommendations, design and product changes to keep all Twitter users safe, has less than 20 full-time employees.

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Internal records indicate that there are also about 1,400 non-working Twitter employees who are still being paid but are no longer expected to carry out their former responsibilities with the social media company. Many of them quit when CEO Elon Musk sent out a “pledge” asking them to engage in “hardcore” Twitter 2.0 work, including long hours.

Musk tweeted early Saturday that there are approximately 2,300 “active and working” employees on Twitter. “There are still hundreds of employees working on trust and security, as well as several thousand contractors,” he added.

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter downsized through mass layoffs, other layoffs and changes that forced many to quit, including ending a forever work-from-home policy that had been put in place. in place under former CEO Jack Dorsey.

Before Musk led a $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter last year, Twitter’s workforce numbered around 7,500 employees. Layoffs have been internally rumored and are expected to occur whether or not Musk’s takeover goes ahead. However, Musk has cut Twitter staff far more than expected — or by about 80% according to internal records and two recent employees who spoke with CNBC.

According to an engineer who resigned from the company, the loss of employees and downsizing will make it harder to reliably maintain the service while developing new features.

This person, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing a former employer, explained that the company’s code base is huge and requires knowledge of different platforms and programming languages ​​to maintain different parts of Twitter – ad services versus the main timeline, eg. Engineers’ skill sets, they said, are not necessarily transferable across all of these areas. And it will be difficult to train engineers after losing so much institutional knowledge, the person added.

In addition to about 1,300 full-time employees, Musk has also authorized about 130 people from his other businesses, including You’re hereSpaceX and The Boring Company, as well as talent from venture capital funds and other companies, to work at Twitter.

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has faced backlash from Tesla shareholders for being distracted, sparking political controversy with his Twitter strategy, and selling billions of dollars of his stock. Tesla to fund its takeover of Twitter.

Clarification: This story has been updated to note that all 1,300 people are active Twitter employees. Another 1,400 people do not work, but are paid employees of Twitter.