Twitter has laid off the engineering team working on the company’s tweets-via-text offering created after the acquisition of ZipDial, according to a source familiar with the move.
Twitter laid off its ZipDial engineering team in India
Twitter is moving away from tweets-via-text.
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images
The team, which worked out of Twitter’s India office in Bangalore, comprised about 20 people, according to the Economic Times, which first broke the news.
The decision to disband this team comes a few weeks after Recode reported that Twitter’s board was considering all kinds of cost-cutting measures, including layoffs and changes to non-core parts of Twitter’s business (basically anything outside of the core Twitter app).
But a Twitter spokesperson says that these layoffs are an isolated incident and not part of a broader cost cutting plan. “As part of our normal business review, we have decided to de-prioritize the ZipDial initiative,” the spokesperson said.
The point of ZipDial, which joined Twitter via an acquisition back in January 2015, was to help Twitter deliver tweets to users via SMS and missed-call technology, a popular communication method in parts of the world where data plans are expensive or scarce.
At one point, Twitter started including these SMS-only users in its quarterly earnings reports. But that only lasted a few quarters before it went back to reporting just traditional monthly active users.
Now it appears to be moving away from SMS-delivered tweets altogether.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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