Twitter is seeing a new round of layoffs affecting nearly 50 employees, including senior executive Esther Crawford, who oversaw the Twitter Blue verification subscription. The layoffs also impacted Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of newsletter platform Revue, which was acquired by Twitter in 2021.
According to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer and Alex Heath of The Verge, Twitter fired Crawford along with most of the members of the remaining product team over the weekend.
Crawford was among the few remaining members of Twitter’s product team following Elon Musk’s official takeover in late October 2022 and had survived through several round of layoffs that happened recently at the company.
Crawford emerged as one of the prominent product managers at Twitter 2.0 and top Musk loyalist after a picture of her sleeping on the office floor went viral.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she had tweeted along with a picture of herself sleeping on the office floor with a sleeping bag and eye mask.
According to a Financial Times report, Crawford introduced herself to Musk in company’s café and even set up a one-on-one meeting with Musk days before the Twitter acquisition deal closed. She was scolded for this by the company’s top officials. The move also didn’t sit well with other employees with one of the senior staffers calling her as “bootlicking” to the media.
Crawford also rubbed Twitter employees the wrong way when she justified last year’s mass layoff on the company’s internal Slack team. Reportedly, she wrote, “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”
The Verge reports, those fired were notified by email on Saturday by the company. The latest layoff is said to have impacted several departments at Twitter including ads and infrastructure engineering. While the exact figure is unknown, it is being reported that Twitter has less than 2,000 employees left now.
The layoffs come as Twitter continues to struggle with plummeting revenue with large number of advertisers fleeing from the platform. The microblogging platform has been working to diversify its revenue streams and has launched several new products and features, including Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that offers additional features such as the ability to undo tweets and access to a dedicated customer support team. Crawford had been overseeing the development of Twitter Blue, and her departure could raise questions about the future of the subscription service.