Twitter shuts down its offices in Delhi & Mumbai, ask staff to work from home

Twitter Inc. has shut down two of its three India offices and told its staff to work from home, underscoring Elon Musk's mission to slash costs and get the struggling social media service in the black. Twitter, which fired more than 90% of its roughly 200-plus staff in India late last year, closed its offices in the political center of New Delhi and the financial hub of Mumbai, people aware of the matter said.

The company continues to operate an office in the southern tech hub of Bengaluru that mostly houses engineers, the people said, declining to be identified as the information is private.

Billionaire Chief Executive Officer Musk has fired staff and shut offices around the world as part of an effort to get Twitter financially stable by late 2023. Yet India is regarded as a key growth market for US tech giants from Meta Platforms Inc. to Alphabet Inc.'s Google, which are making long-term bets on the world's fastest-growing internet arena. Musk's latest moves suggest he's attaching less importance to the market for now.

Twitter has evolved in past years into one of India's most important public forums, home to heated political discourse and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 86.5 million followers. Yet revenue there isn't significant for Musk's company, which also has to contend with strict content regulations and increasingly savvy local competition.