Twitter lays off hundreds of employees, including a chief executive

More people will be losing their jobs at Twitter after the company announced more layoffs. Fortunately, it’s not as bad as last time, but it does reflect what’s been going on with the company lately since Musk took over, as well as the ongoing inflation and the impending signs of recession.

Bloomberg reported that around 200 people have been let go from the company, and the engineering and product department in the company are the ones most likely to be affected. Employees reported that people found out either through email or when they were unable to access internal software.

Alongside the affected workers was Twitter’s top executive, Esther Crawford. She was in charge of the site’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, and also the chief executive of Twitter payments. She is known for the “sleep where you work” tweet, where a co-worker took a photo of her sleeping on the floor and she justified her actions by saying it’s necessary due to deadlines.

Crawford commented on the recent layoffs, saying that she’s grateful for the team who were still able to get through their work despite the “noise” and that she doesn’t see her optimism for hard work as a mistake. Especially when she showed enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0.

According to the New York Times, Twitter is roughly down to 2000 employees, compared to the 7500 back in October before the Musk acquisition. A week before the layoffs, it was reported that the employees were unable to communicate with each other through Slack and some were unable to log in through their corporate accounts. Once employees caught on to what was happening, some began to write farewell messages while others scrambled to see who was affected through encrypted chatrooms like Signal.

There were multiple staff reductions since Musk purchased Twitter in 2022. While he did reassured employees that there would no longer be layoffs in an internal meeting back in November, multiple people left the company either due to not accepting Musk’s ultimatum of creating a “hardcore” Twitter 2.0. or due to Musk firing them on the spot.