Twitter's Head Of France Damien Viel Leaves Company Amid Staff Exodus

Micro-blogging site Twitter's Head of France, Damien Viel has announced he is leaving the company amid upcoming additional layoffs at the embattled platform under new boss Elon Musk.

In another change to Twitter, Musk last week announced users will get the ability to post long tweets soon.

Micro-blogging site Twitter's Head of France, Damien Viel has announced he is leaving the company amid upcoming additional layoffs at the embattled platform under its new boss Elon Musk, the media has reported. In a tweet, Viel announced his departure from Twitter amid a staff exodus at the company and further expected job cuts.

Viel also confirmed his departure in a separate message to news agency Bloomberg. He had led the region for almost seven years. A number of workers at the Paris office, which had fewer than 50 employees before billionaire Musk took over last month, are focused on advertiser relationships, the Bloomberg report added.

This comes amid Musk's plan to fire more Twitter employees starting Monday (November 21) targeting the social media platform’s sales and partnership departments after it witnessed mass resignations from engineers last week. Those who left included employees in technical roles compared to those in sales, partnerships, and similar roles, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg. On Friday, he directed leaders in those organisations to look for firing more employees.

Robin Wheeler, who has been heading marketing and sales declined to consider firing employees, as per the source. Similarly, Maggie Suniewick, who ran partnerships also apparently opposed the move. Both ended up losing their jobs as a result, the report stated.

After the chaotic takeover by tech billionaire Musk, a series of new changes are happening at the company. The new CEO recently replied to famed app researcher Jane Manchun Wong with a "wink" when she tweeted that Twitter is bringing back end-to-end encrypted DMs for Twitter on Android, thus, indicating that Twitter may be working towards introducing end-to-end encryption for direct messages (DMs).

In another change to Twitter, Musk last week announced users will get the ability to post long tweets soon.

"Ability to do long tweets coming soon," Musk tweeted while replying to a series of tweets.

Twitter began as an SMS text-based service, which limited the original Tweet length to 140 characters (which was partly driven by the 160-character limit of SMS, with 20 characters reserved for commands and usernames). Over time as the micro-blogging site evolved, the maximum Tweet length grew to 280 characters -- still short and brief, but enabling more expression, according to Twitter Developer Platform.