SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter announced Tuesday that it was laying off up to 336 employees, or 8 percent of its workforce, to cut costs while it tries to find ways to attract new users.
The cuts are one of the first major moves by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who was named chief executive of the social media company last week.
"We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow," Dorsey wrote in an email to employees. "We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel."
Twitter also said that revenue and adjusted profit for the third quarter would be at or above its previous forecasts. The high end of the company's previous forecast predicted revenue of $560 million and adjusted earnings of $115 million.
News of the impending layoffs leaked out Friday, after the market closed.
Twitter's workforce has grown quickly in recent years, through acquisitions and hiring. As of June 30, the company had about 4,100 employees, an increase of more than 800 people, or 24 percent, from the previous June.
At the same time, the company has struggled to increase its base of active users, with many potential customers finding the service too difficult to use. As of the second quarter, the company had 316 million users, up 15 percent from the previous year.
Advertisers, the principal source of Twitter's revenue, have also complained that Twitter's offerings are less compelling than those of Facebook and Google.
Twitter said it would provide "generous" exit packages to those who lose their jobs. It intends to take a pretax charge of $5 million to $15 million in the fourth quarter in connection with the layoffs.
During the conference call last week announcing his appointment as chief executive, Dorsey offered several Delphic hints that cutbacks were coming.
"We've been reviewing and pushing hard on our road maps, making sure that we're doing fewer things," he said at that time. "There's a huge desire for more efficiency, and there's a huge opportunity to really raise the bar on our execution."
However, he also said during that call that morale was strong, and "we're going to make sure that we put extra emphasis on continuing to recruit great people to this company."