Twitter has laid off at least 50 more employees, according to a report by The Information and social media posts from former employees.
And apparently even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the Twitter Payments chief executive who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, wasn’t spared, according to Platformer Zoë Schiffer. Alex Heath from The Verge too confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were fired this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning the house to redecorate it with a new regimen.
Recall that Crawford even got swept up in Musk’s hard-core takeover of Twitter last year to boast on the platform about sleeping in the office to deal with her new boss’s 24-hour demands.
The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they could no longer use Slack. While it later transpired that Twitter had failed to pay its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The platformer reported that someone at Twitter had manually closed access. Many employees were concerned that this was the first sign of layoffs, and while correlation does not equate to causation, an entire company being cut off from their main means of communication as the layoffs began to fall like bombs caused confusion and confusion everywhere. panic.
“Slack is gone, so nobody knows what’s going on,” reads a post on Blind, an anonymous platform for verified employees. “People receive emails at 2am on Saturdays and access is shut down immediately. This will go down as one of the most extreme layoffs in the company’s history.”
The post went on to list the magnitude of the layoffs: 50% in human relations, 60% in sales and marketing, 35% in engineering, 40% in finance and 80% in project management. Workers have been given one month’s severance pay, the poster said. Twitter has not responded to requests for comment, nor has it released a public statement about the layoffs.
The Information’s report also notes that Twitter kicked off this round of layoffs by letting go of its ad sales staff on Feb. 17.
A senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he found out about his own lack of work after losing access to his email account.
“Waking up to discover I can no longer access my email. Looks like I’ve been let go. Now my Revue journey is really over.” tweeted de Kuiper. The manager founded Revue, an editorial newsletter tool that was acquired by Twitter in 2021.
Since Musk took over Twitter last October, the company’s workforce has fallen by more than 70%. This latest round of layoffs comes after Musk promised in November there would be no more layoffs. But Musk has a reputation for making promises he can’t keep, whether it’s swearing Tesla will solve full self-driving every year next year since 2014 or reassuring investors he’s done selling Tesla stock. , only to sell $3.5 billion more in Tesla stock.
Musk did not respond to AapkaDost’s request for comment, made through the Musk equivalent of a Hail Mary – via tweet.