Is Twitter’s global shitstorm hitting its Bangalore engineers?

Photo credit: mshcdn.com via Says.

Twitter’s global problems have started showing, and the casualty is its much celebrated development hub in Bangalore.

The company said it fired about 20 people from the hub (local media says that’s about 80 percent of its strength) and decided to stop the global engineering work at the Bangalore development center.

Last year, the microblogging site bought Zipdial, an Indian startup that has made a business off missed calls – the practice of dialling a number and hanging up before the call is received. And then later, it opened its R&D facility in India, which was to be a global center to develop local language products for its non-English speaking markets.

Predictably, Twitter played down the firing.

“As part of our normal business review, we have decided to stop the global engineering work at the Bangalore development center.”

“We have offices in three locations in India: Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Only the global engineering workforce in Bangalore is affected, we will continue to maintain a presence in Bangalore for other functions,” a company spokesperson said.

Sources in India said the impacted employees were originally a part of the ZipDial team, which had been losing traction. A Reuters report backed those claims.

Twitter did not clarify. “ We don’t comment on past acquisitions,” a spokesperson said.

Twitter bought ZipDial in January 2015.

Twitter has been seeing problems with weak revenue and users for some time now. To add to that, Re/code said the company could be up for sale, and that an investor has sued the company for “materially false and misleading statements” made early last year.

On Tuesday, a Twitter India spokesperson said the company “remains committed to India as a strategic market for users, partners, and advertisers,” and that the country was one of its fastest growing markets worldwide, but that still does not explain the shutting down of what was supposed to be a thriving unit for the company.

“To begin with, the India engineering center will focus on three things – build product that are unique and distinct to Indian market, appeals to local traditions customs and interests. Second, to make sure our app performs in a world-class manner, regardless of internet connection, and finally, to make sure it’s accessible regardless of the device people are using, language they speak, income or location,” the company’s global vice-president for product management had told the Economic Times last year.