Twitter India is emptying out its offices

The company's other cost-cutting measures include cutting down employee benefits and stopping vendor payments.

Social media platform Twitter is in discussions to vacate the co-working seats it has in Delhi and Mumbai, and has already given up the Bengaluru facility, sources aware of the matter said.

Sources said that the process was initiated in December. The company has around 150 seats at the WeWork facility in Mumbai’s BKC, and around 80 seats at The Executive Centre in Delhi’s Qutub area.

The company had a few co-working seats in Bengaluru as well, which it has given up, the sources added, stating that this was a reflection of what was happening within the company globally.

The social networking firm had shut down its global engineering operations (a conventional office) in Bengaluru in 2016, and had vacated the office space then. There was no response to an email sent to press@twitter.com. There was no comment from WeWork and TEC.

Last November, media reports had said that Twitter had announced that it was temporarily closing some of its offices. This came on the heels of owner Elon Musk’s ultimatum to employees: stay with the company “working long hours at high intensity," or quit with three months’ severance pay. Reports had said that some employees in India received `‘survivor’’ emails (a term coined by employees for those who weren’t fired) that their jobs had not been impacted.

This week, on January 11, workers at Twitter's Singapore office were asked to vacate the premises the same day . They were told by email that they had time until 5 pm to leave the CapitaGreen Building and resume duties remotely, media reports have said. Singapore is the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters.

These moves come as tech billionaire Musk has been looking for ways to drastically cut Twitter's costs since he bought the company for $44 billion in October. He laid off about 50 percent of its workforce, or around 3,700 employees, in November last year. The job cuts were more severe in India, with 90 percent of over 200 employees reportedly fired.

Musk has subsequently overseen further rounds of layoffs across various functions, including product, engineering, infrastructure, policy, content moderation, and sales, in recent months. The company now has roughly 2,000 employees across the world.

The company's other cost-cutting measures include cutting down employee benefits and stopping vendor payments. In December 2022, Twitter was also sued for alleged non-payment of rent for its San Francisco headquarters by its landlord Columbia Property Trust.

In a live Twitter Spaces session last month, Musk had defended these measures, comparing the company to a "plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work."

"That’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy," he said.

Musk said Twitter was previously on track to spend $5 billion in 2023. With an additional $1.5 billion required to service the debt related to the acquisition, Twitter was facing a net cash outflow of $6.5 billion with revenue of about $3 billion next year. That amounted to negative cash flow of about $3 billion, Musk said, adding that Twitter had $1 billion in cash on its balance sheet.