USA: Twitter fires at least 200 more employees

The short message service Twitter reportedly laid off about 10 percent of its remaining workforce, i.e. at least 200 employees, on Sunday night. The move is part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing effort to cut costs at the social media company. The workforce had previously been reduced from around 7,500 employees to around 2,000. Employees from various teams at the company have been affected by the latest wave of layoffs, including some from Twitter’s sales and product teams, according to people familiar with the situation New York Times reported. But also any engineers who keep the systems of the social media giant running.

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While some employees received emails late Saturday that they were being fired, others were reportedly not notified of their termination until they tried and failed to log into the internal system. Those fired also appeared to include senior Twitter product manager Martijn de Kuijper, whose Dutch start-up Revue, a digital newsletter, was bought by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. “I wake up to find I’ve been locked out of my emails. Looks like I’ve been fired. Now my revue journey is really over,” de Kuijper tweeted early Sunday.

An email to another employee, dated Saturday, said the person’s role was removed as part of a broader review, according to a the Wall Street Journal present copy. “Today is your last day at the company,” the email said. According to journalist Zoë Schiffer, “hardcore Musk loyalists” like Esther Crawford, who was previously managing director of Twitter Payments, also fell victim to the wave of layoffs.

Crawford’s firing prompted the social media repost of a photo taken shortly after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in November 2022, showing Crawford in a sleeping bag and eye mask at the Twitter offices you can see. “When your team is working 24/7 to meet deadlines sometimes you sleep #SleepWhereYouWork,” Crawford tweeted at the time, echoing Twitter’s infamous “LoveWhereYouWork” mantra.

While some Twitter users have slammed Crawford’s loyalty to Musk, Behnam Rezaei, Twitter’s former product and engineering chief who left the company in January, defended her as a “great product leader” who “has worked hard to make Twitter better.” Rezaei clarified that the product manager “didn’t push anyone out”. Instead, her failure was simply “that many ‘men’ are afraid of strong women”. Among other things, Crawford oversaw the development of the Twitter payment platform Twitter-Blue, which should enable verified users to send money to other users in the future.

How the information reports that the latest job cuts are largely aimed at making up for the company’s slump in sales following its acquisition by Musk. He said in November that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled back spending over concerns about content moderation. Many advertisers were skeptical about where Musk, who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist,” would take the platform. The billionaire then tried to generate income in other ways. So far, however, these efforts have hardly been able to contribute to the financial improvement of the company.

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