Twitter has reportedly laid off 200 employees over the weekend. According to the New York Times and other sources, this latest round of layoffs seems to have hit Twitter’s product team pretty hard.
Esther Crawford, the product manager in charge of Twitter Blue is among the Twitter employees that just lost their job. Crawford was one of the new Twitter faces that emerged after Elon Musk acquired the company back in October, and she had the difficult task of relaunching Twitter’s existing Blue subscription, which was one of Musk’s first priorities.
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
Previously described as a Twitter loyalist, Crawford proudly shared a picture of her sleeping on the floor at Twitter’s offices as her team was “pushing round the clock to make deadlines.” In a tweet posted a couple of hours ago, Crawford dismissed the criticism regarding her enthusiasm for “Twitter 2.0,” and said that she was “proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos.”
The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos. 💙
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
According to The Verge’s Alex Heath, Twitter is still “trying to hire back engineers from previous cuts,” even though the employees that are said to be “working for less money.” In just a couple of months, Twitter’s workforce went from 7,500 to roughly 2,000 employees, and the company’s product team has been left in shambles. “Hearing Twitter has fewer than a dozen employees left working on consumer product and design. A real exercise in tearing a company down to the studs,” the reporter tweeted.
Even though it’s quite unprecedented to see such drastic job cuts happening at a company the size of Twitter, Elon Musk recently commented on his plans to find a new CEO by the end of the year. “I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and the product road map is clearly laid out,” the Twitter CEO said.