More bad news coming out of the Twitter camp, this time in the form of corporate layoffs. Shares of the company began to drop after reports began to trickle out that personnel cuts were on the horizon, and today we know that those reports were accurate. Returning CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter will be laying off 336 employees.

Mark Zuckerberg must smell blood in the water.

Twitter has had a rough go of it since going public, with the corporate leadership reshuffling galore and differing opinions as to the overall vision and direction of the company. There’s also been rumblings that it was considering ditching its 140 character limit format to allow for longer messages.

Abandoning your flagship interface and design to gin up a greater usage base? Yeah, things are not going so well so far in the second Jack Dorsey era.

Rationalizing corporate employment cuts is never an easy task, but Dorsey’s explanation so far is a bit mindboggling. In a memo to employees, Dorsey cited increased productivity as a prime factor for the layoffs, stating “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce.”

Say what you will about Dorsey’s theories on productivity and mass-layoffs, but make sure you factor in the morale hit that Twitter will take internally. In a company struggling to establish itself as a force on the stock market, creating a potentially disenfranchised, disengaged and disgruntled group of engineers doesn’t seem to be the smartest move.

Rest assured we’ll see how it all pans out in real-time and in 140 characters or less.