Twitter Employees Use Twitter to Announce Being Fired

Elon Musk fired more Twitter employees within the past week after saying he was done with layoffs.

Twitter employees announced their firings on the social media platform again as Elon Musk continues to ax his workforce.

A key executive, Esther Crawford, is part of a new wave of layoffs announced this weekend, according to media sources.

DONT MISS: Twitter Executive Who Coined Controversial #SleepWhereYouWork Is Out

Musk had previously said he was done firing employees, but went back on his word as this was the third round of layoffs, totaling to 10% of the remaining workforce.

Dozens of employees in the sales and engineering departments lost their jobs during the past week, according to the Verge and The Information. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported 200 people were laid off, including many who found out on Feb. 25, only days after not being able to use Slack, a messaging platform, to communicate with each other.

The number of employees has dwindled down to 2,000 from a workforce of 7,500 when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last October.

Musk Fires Key Employees

The layoffs impacted engineers, data scientists and product managers who used machine learning and made the social media website reliable, according to the New York Times.

Musk also fired the monetization infrastructure team that works on the features that generate revenue for Twitter. That team had 12 layoffs, leaving only eight employees from an original headcount of 30, sources told the New York Times.

Numerous employees of Twitter announced their firings over the weekend.

One Twitter employee, Kelvin Leung, announced his firing on Feb. 25 on the social media app.

"Well that’s a wrap! Just got my separation notice," he tweeted.

Leung had worked at Twitter for over six years in the payments division.

"6 yrs and 4 months, >$2B in payments, countless wonderful memories and people, 1 global pandemic, lots of swag, lots of food #LoveWhereYouWorked," he tweeted.

During the last round of layoffs, employees often were not informed that they were being fired. Instead, they found out in a cold fashion when they discovered not being able to log onto their laptops, email or Slack, a messaging service platform.

Employees who had founded companies that Twitter bought over the past several years were also let go, including Haraldur Thorleifsson, who created of the design studio Ueno, which Twitter purchased in 2021.

Another tech company founder, Martin de Kuijper, who started Revue, a service that "makes it easy for writers and publishers to send editorial newsletters -- and get paid" and became part of @TwitterWrite, said he learned of his dismissal when he could not access his email.

"Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email," he tweeted. "Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over." 

He replied to Musk's tweet on Sunday with sarcasm.

"Thank you, Elon!"

Musk fired Crawford despite her self-proclaimed and public loyalty to the billionaire. She was known for coining the controversial hashtag #SleepWhereYouWork.

Crawford became well-known by distinguishing herself by posting a photo of her sleeping on the floor in the offices of Twitter last November. She had joined Twitter after founding an app called Squad that allowed users to share screens and conduct video chats. Her role recently was to lead Twitter’s effort to charge people for the infamous blue verification check marks. 

She wanted to embody Musk's vision of Twitter 2.0. The CEO of Tesla had just completed the acquisition of the social network and sought to revamp the platform which was losing a lot of money. He wanted to drastically reduce costs and asked employees to multiply their efforts.

When many employees were averse to sacrificing their private life for work, Crawford created the controversial hashtag #SleepWhereYouWork.

"When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork," Crawford wrote on Nov. 2.

"Since some people are losing their minds I'll explain: doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc). I have teammates around the world who are putting in the effort to bring something new to life so it's important to me to show up for them & keep the team unblocked," Crawford wrote in another tweet that day.

Despite her sacrifices, Crawford did not last in the Musk era. She confirmed a report from Platformer's Zoë Schiffer that she is part of a new wave of layoffs that the microblogging website carried out over the weekend of Feb. 25.

"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," Crawford said. "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."

Crawford was not the only key employee that was fired.

Earlier in February, a Twitter engineer said he was fired by Musk for refusing to to inflate his popularity by increasing his view counts.

The engineer, who goes by the name "jordan," said he turned down the request from Musk to increase the number of view counts for his personal account.

"This was me, my 6.5-year stint at Twitter comes to an end today," he tweeted on Feb. 9. "Proud of the work we did and have full confidence the three or four people left will be able to honor Elon’s requests to artificially inflate his view counts (and view counts for advertisers). Not me though."

Twitter has lost advertisers, users and ad revenue since Musk took the company private.

Advertisers backed away from Twitter after Musk allowed accounts that were previously banned and tweeted problematic or racist comments.

Musk has been focusing on his view counts, which is how many people can see the tweets he posts.