Sources: Elon Musk fired over 90% of Twitter's 200+ staff in India over the weekend, including ~70% of the product and engineering teams
Twitter Inc. fired more than 90% of its staff in India over the weekend — part of global reductions by new owner Elon Musk — severely depleting …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the sharpest regional cut inside the global reduction Musk began executing on November 4, after his plan to cut ~3,700 jobs leaked days earlier. India was not a peripheral office: with 200+ staff and roughly 70% of them in product and engineering, it was one of Twitter's larger engineering hubs outside the US.
The severity stands out even against the parent action — over 90% versus roughly half company-wide — and lands just as Twitter is discovering the cost of cutting fast, having already begun asking dozens of laid-off staff to return because some were needed for features Musk wants or were fired in error.
First-order effects
- Twitter's India operation loses nearly all of its 200+ staff in one weekend, including about 70% of its product and engineering teams, leaving no local bench to maintain or build the features Musk has prioritized.
Second-order effects
- The cut deepens the rehiring problem already visible in the global layoffs: if India-based engineers were among those fired in error or needed for Musk's feature roadmap, they must be re-recruited from a market where ex-Twitter staff now hold competing offers.
- Depleting an entire regional engineering hub concentrates remaining product work in fewer locations, raising the odds that the attrition wave seen later in November — 1,200+ full-time employees resigning on November 17 by internal estimates — hits harder among survivors asked to absorb the load.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — deepest cuts in remote and offshore engineering hubs, followed by rolling re-cuts like the February sales-and-engineering layoffs — Twitter's structure shifts from a globally distributed workforce to a small core concentrated around Musk's immediate priorities, making future capacity dependent on contractors and rehires rather than owned teams.
The trend: Musk's takeover is converting Twitter from a globally distributed engineering organization into a thin core team that cuts first and rehires selectively when capability gaps surface.