Twitter witnessed a new round of layoffs, including Esther Crawford, director of product management at the company, whose image spread last year while she was asleep at her workplace at the company's headquarters in San Francisco, California, USA.
Crawford was one of the executives who were responsible for the subscription service to obtain the notarization mark, and after the management's decision to fire her, she tweeted, "The worst thing you can get ... is that my optimism or hard work was wrong."
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.
đź’™
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023
After US billionaire Elon Musk purchased the Twitter platform on October 27, 2022, Crawford became famous for writing a post that quickly spread on social media, saying, "Employees sometimes have to sleep at the workplace in order to meet deadlines for assignment delivery."
Crawford was shown sleeping on the floor between a table and some chairs, in what looked like a conference room, with a sleeping cap over her eyes under the desk lights.
When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
Some said at the time that the employee was afraid of being fired and was actively posting updates about the new plans for the social media platform.
Crawford tweeted at the time, "Elon is willing to try a lot of things, many that will fail, and some that will work. The goal is to find the right mix of changes that work to ensure the long-term health and growth of the business."
I love my family and I'm grateful they understand that there are times where I need to go into overdrive to grind and push in order to deliver.
Building new things at Twitter's scale is very hard to do.
I'm lucky to be doing this work alongside some of the best people in tech.
đź’™
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
Late Saturday night, some of the fired employees, including Crawford, received an email terminating their employment with the company, while others tweeted that they had discovered they had been fired after failing to access the company's internal system.
Waking up to find I've been locked out of my email.
Looks like I'm let go.
Now my Revue journey is really over 🫡
— Martijn (@mdekuijper) February 26, 2023
The Twitter platform, which was established in 2006, is one of the largest social media platforms, as it has reached more than 100 million active users today, and more than 500 million tweets are published on it daily.
A week after buying it in a $44 billion deal, US billionaire Elon Musk decided in early November to lay off about half of the giant company's employees, or about 3,700 employees out of 7,500.
Among the most prominent of those laid off are Alfonzo Funes Terrell and Davis Brown, who are currently working on a social media platform called "Spill" and promoting it as an alternative to the Twitter application.
On February 18, Twitter closed two of its three offices in India, according to a Bloomberg report, which indicated that more than 90% of the company's employees working in India were fired last year.
Regarding Twitter's reduction in strength, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
Last month, the company ordered the reduction of at least 12 job titles in its Dublin and Singapore offices as part of cost-cutting measures.
Musk had previously justified the decision to dismiss and lay off employees by the loss incurred by the platform, tweeting, "Unfortunately, there was no other option for Twitter other than to reduce the number of its employees, and it loses more than 4 million dollars a day."