Twitter is planning a large round of layoffs that could see up to eight per cent of its current staff, or 300 people, let go from the troubled social media company.

According to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter, planning for the cuts is still fluid and the final number could change. A similar number of staff were let go when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as CEO last year.

Twitter is hoping to control its spending and costs as its sales growth slows. The company has yet to make a profit, and recently explored the possibility of a sale, but the companies that expressed an interest in bidding, including Salesforce.com, Alphabet and Disney, later backed out.

The companys stock has fallen 40 per cent in the past 12 months, making it more difficult to offer stock options to engineers as a supplement to a salary, and meaning the company has struggled to compete for talent with other firms like Facebook and Google.

Twitter plans to reveal its Q3 financial results on Thursday, and has just rescheduled them for the opening of the New York Stock Exchange at 7.00am Eastern Standard Time, when many of its investors on the west coast of America will still be asleep.

Whether confirmation of the cuts will come before or after the financial disclosure remains to be seen, and while it would certainly ease shareholder worries, its yet another signal to the industry that Twitter is struggling to remain in business.