Twitter lays off 9% staff

Twitter plans to cut 9 per cent of its staff, or roughly 350 people to cut costs as it refocuses its business.

The micro-blogging site announced the cuts on early Thursday, along with the company's Q3 earnings, which overtook Wall Street expectations.

Employees received emails about job cuts just ahead of the announcement of the earnings. The cuts were largely confined to the company's marketing and sales teams.

''We're getting more disciplined about how we invest in the business, and we set a company goal of driving toward GAAP profitability in 2017,'' CFO Anthony Noto said in Twitter's earnings press release. ''We intend to fully invest in our highest priorities and are de-prioritising certain initiatives and simplifying how we operate in other areas.''

The board of directors had discussed cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, back in early September. In the past few months there had been much talk about a sale that failed to materialise, as companies looked at acquiring Twitter and decided not to offer a bid. Bloomberg had reported on Monday that layoffs were on the way.

According to commentators, the main hurdle to the acquisition was the cost of acquisition, which was pegged at around at least $20 billion.

Twitter earnings stood at 13 cents per share and revenue of $616 million, as the service grew to 317 million users. Analysts were looking for earnings of 9 cents per share on around $606 million in revenue, as well as 315 million monthly active users. The company last year had 313 million monthly active users.

Twitter's shares were up as much as 5 per cent in pre-market trading.

As Twitter looked forward, it said it would not be reporting revenue guidance, a tradition for many technology companies, as it looked to set expectations for Wall Street in the coming months.

That seemed largely due to  the company restructuring its sales teams, according to commentators,  as it ''will move from three sales channels to two.''