Twitter laid off as many as 200 employees over the weekend, including a key figure who helped establish the site’s new system to charge for verification, according to reports.
Dozens of employees at the social media giant wrote they found themselves locked out of the company’s email and internal message boards. The cuts ultimately impacted people on several important teams, including product managers and engineers that help keep Twitter online.
The Information was the first to report the cuts.
The layoffs amounted to about 10% of Twitter’s remaining 2,000 employees, The New York Times reported. The company had about 7,500 workers when Elon Musk acquired the platform in October.
Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments, was among those who lost her job, The Verge reported. The monetization team, the Times added, was also slashed from about 30 employees to less than eight.
Martijn de Kuijper, a senior product manager who founded the tool Revue, which Twitter acquired in 2021, said he woke up to find out he’d be locked out of his email with no notice.
“Looks like I’m let go,” de Kuijper wrote on Twitter. “Now my Revue journey is really over.”
Twitter’s been in a period of turmoil since Musk’s takeover, and various launches and site abilities have wavered in recent months. Earlier in February, many users were unable to send tweets or message other people for hours in a worldwide glitch.
Musk has been on a crusade to increase Twitter’s revenue after he purchased the site for $44 billion. That included a mass layoff in November and the dramatic plans to charge for verification checkmarks.
Musk promised after that round of cuts that layoffs had ended.
