300 Twitter employees might lose their jobs this week [Update: Make that 350]

Update: Twitter noted in its Q3 2016 earnings results (PDF) on Thursday that it is laying off about 350 employees, amounting to roughly 9 percent of its global workforce. It’ll cost the firm between $15 million and $30 million in severance costs and compensation expenditures. The company noted:

“The restructuring allows us to continue to fully fund our highest priorities, while eliminating investment in non-core areas and driving greater efficiency.”

Our original report follows below.

Twitter is gearing up to lay off 300 employees this week, Bloomberg reports.

That means the company’s workforce will shrink by about 8 percent. However, according to Bloomberg’s anonymous sources, the number of employees being let go could change as Twitter’s restructuring plans are still fluid. TechCrunch noted that the firm’s sales team may be impacted the most.

The news comes ahead of the company’s release of its Q3 2016 earnings on October 27. Incidentally, it’s reporting earnings at 4AM PST instead of the usual 1PM PST most West Coast companies go with. It’s possible that it’s hoping to downplay bad news or that it truly believes its own excuse about being overshadowed by other firms like Google and Amazon reporting at the same time.

To put it mildly, Twitter has not had a great year. When Jack Dorsey was named CEO last October, he laid off about 8 percent of the company’s staff. Since then, Twitter’s share value has dropped by about 40 percent and its growth has slowed significantly. It’s now worth less than its Chinese clone, Weibo.

The company had reportedly begun looking to sell itself within a month around the beginning of October, but all three potential buyers – Google, Disney and Salesforce – backed out in short order.

Bloomberg speculates that the Twitter’s poor figures over the past year have made it difficult for the company to offer its engineers stock options as payment, and that reducing its employee count could help relieve that pressure to some extent. It’ll be interesting to see what Twitter has to share about its future later this week.