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- Junior Twitter employees have been left in charge of areas they haven't worked on before, per NYT.
- Twitter's workforce is about a quarter of the size that it was before Elon Musk took over.
- The social-media platform has seen at least four outages in the last month.
Elon Musk's cost-cutting layoffs at Twitter mean that some junior employees have been left in charge of areas they're unfamiliar with, therefore increasing the likelihood of outages, The New York Times reported.
At least 200 employees were let go over the weekend, per the Times, leaving Twitter with around a quarter of the 7,500 staff it had before Musk took over last October. That means Twitter now has less staff than the 2,700 it had when it went public in 2013.
Those caught up in the latest round of Twitter layoffs include top managers like Esther Crawford, who was among a small number of senior staff from "Twitter 1.0" to strongly back Musk's leadership, and who went viral last November when a colleague posted a picture of her sleeping on the office floor.
Twitter staff changes also mean it is without a permanent head of global infrastructure, the Times reported, after Musk's chosen replacement — a Tesla engineer — resigned in January.
The Times report cites unnamed current and former staff as saying there is a lack of clear leadership internally at Twitter since the layoffs, with some junior staffers overseeing products and services that haven't touched before.
Having less experienced staff means that errors may be more likely, and a reduced workforce means it can take longer to figure out any problems and get the service back online.
In December, Musk shut down a Twitter data center in Sacramento, California, which helped handle much of the site's web traffic.
Last month, Twitter suffered the biggest outage since Musk's takeover when users were wrongly told they were over their daily tweet limit. According to Platformer, an employee accidentally deleted data and the team responsible for the service had all left the company in November.
Another temporary outage occurred when an engineer rolled out a change without testing it first, which was the previous practice, per the Times. Nearly a thousand users also reported problems with Twitter during the Super Bowl halftime show.
There was a further problem on Wednesday morning, where users' feeds were briefly replaced with a welcome page which implied they didn't follow anyone, with over 5,000 reports submitted on DownDetector.
The latest layoffs were conducted with the help of Steve Davis, the CEO of Musk's Boring Company who is rumored to be primed as Twitter's next CEO, per Platformer. The tech newsletter also reported that Davis has been sleeping at the social-media company's San Francisco office along with his partner and their newborn baby.
Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.