Remember Twitter Gaming (opens in new tab)? This official Twitter account debuted in early 2016 as part of an effort to "support the dedicated gaming community and help top gaming organizations and celebrities deliver quality content and engage with fans on Twitter." But now, amid the chaos and hilarity of the first two weeks of Elon Musk's one-man rule, it seems to have disappeared for good.

The Twitter game account has not tweeted since November 3, the day before Musk halved the number of employees. Reuters (opens in new tab) reports that the layoffs affected a wide range of teams at the company, including communications, content curation, human rights, and ethics. Some product and engineering teams were also affected by the layoffs; Shiraz Siddiqui, a senior social lead at Twitter Gaming, revealed last week that he was laid off as part of the layoffs:

However, the layoffs is not just Siddiqui: according to a new Washington Post (opens in new tab) report, Twitter Gaming's entire marketing department was laid off at the same time. This coincides with the current status of the account, which has 1 million followers and last tweeted on November 3, one day before the layoffs. Prior to that, the account had tweeted almost daily, but has been completely silent for the eight days since.

As breakup tweets go, this was not the most heartening thing I've ever read:

Games in general account for a significant portion of overall Twitter activity: according to the Washington Post, there will be 1.5 billion tweets about games in the first half of 2022." There were 10.4 billion tweets about "news" There is no denying that Twitter is a great source of gaming-related information. I use it a lot in my work, and it's also a great way for content creators to make themselves known to a larger audience. you can get information about games on Twitter without following Twitter Gaming, but this account was a big It appears to have been part of a marketing strategy.

Assuming Twitter itself doesn't collapse and turn to dust by the end of the year (I'd give it a 50/50 chance, given that it has been an absolute gong show (open in new tab) since Musk took over), the Twitter Gaming account is a new team, or under Eron's management, and could resume activity at some point. There are also reports that, as a result of cutting too deep, Twitter is now begging former employees to come back (opens in new tab). For now, it's gone: the ongoing collapse of the world's leading social network's black hole is reeling.