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Twitter Cuts Workforce By 8 Percent to Focus on 'Product Priorities'

Jack Dorsey moves fast.

Twitter said moments ago that it would lay off 8 percent of the company's "global workforce," or up to 336 employees, in an effort to cut costs and streamline operations. These are the first large-scale layoffs in the company's nine-year history.

The layoffs are one of the first major acts carried out by Jack Dorsey, who was appointed as full-time CEO of Twitter on October 5. Dorsey had been serving as interim CEO since July, after previous CEO Dick Costolo stepped down following a string of poor quarters, particularly with respect to slowing using growth.

"When it comes to user growth, the key is going to be appealing to users beyond the current base, and that arguably means building a very different product from the Twitter that's captured 300 million users to date," Jackdaw Research Chief Analyst Jan Dawson told Motherboard. "It means relying far less on the individual account model and working towards more aggregation and curation such that users can just tell Twitter which topics they're interested in and when."

This helps explain why Twitter developed Moments. Formerly known internally as Project Lightning, Moments is a new feature that launched last week that lets people with or without a Twitter account easily follow news, sports, and entertainment topics and events, such as the awarding of the Nobel Prize and the ongoing Major League Baseball playoffs.

Dawson also told Motherboard that Dorsey should stress that this is an example of "one-and-done" cost-cutting and "not something that's going to become a regular occurrence" at Twitter. "Over the next few weeks Dorsey needs to find ways to tell more good news stories, especially when it's time to report earnings."

Technology blog Recode first reported news of the layoffs last week.