Twitter has laid off at least 50 other employees, according to a report from Information and social media posts by former workers.
And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, Twitter’s chief payment executive who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Zoë Schiffer from platforms. Alex Heath from The Verge too confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regimen.
Remember that Crawford had been swept up in Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping in the office to handle the demands of her new boss around the clock.
The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they couldn’t use Slack. While it later emerged that Twitter hadn’t paid its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The Platforms reported that someone on Twitter manually closed access. Many employees worried that this was the first sign of layoffs to come, and while correlation does not equal causation, an entire company that was cut off from its main outlet when layoffs began to fall like bombs caused confusion and panic everywhere.
“Slack is gone so no one knows what’s going on,” says one post blind, an anonymous platform for verified workers. “People get an email at 2am on Saturday and access is immediately cut off. This will go down as one of the most extreme layoffs in all of corporate history.”
The post went on to detail the scope of the layoffs: 50% in human relations, 60% in sales and marketing, 35% in engineering, 40% in finance and 80% in project management. The employees have received a month’s severance pay, said the sign. Twitter has not responded to requests for comment, nor has it released a public statement about the layoffs.
The Information report also notes that Twitter kicked off this round of layoffs by laying off its ad sales staff on February 17.
A senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he found out about his own lack of work after he was locked out of his email account.
“Waking up to discover that I have been blocked from accessing my email. It seems that he let me go. Now my Revue journey is truly over.” tweeted from Kuijper. The manager founded Revue, an editorial newsletter tool acquired by Twitter in 2021.
Since Musk took over Twitter in October last year, the company’s headcount has been cut by more than 70%. This latest round of layoffs comes after Musk promised in November that there would be no more layoffs. But Musk has a reputation for making promises he can’t keep, whether it’s swearing that Tesla will solve fully autonomous driving. “next year” every year since 2014 or assuring investors that he’s done selling Tesla stock, only to sell $3.5 billion more worth of Tesla stock.
Musk has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment, made via Musk’s equivalent of a Hail Mary, via tweet.
