Twitter has had a rough few months and, with the head of Twitter Blue and her team being made redundant and six lawsuits for failing to pay bills in the offing, it seems the blue bird is far from out of the woods.
On Saturday night, Twitter laid off at least 50 members of staff, including staff working in its adtech and engineering teams.
Chief among the layoffs was Esther Crawford, who had been director of product management since December 2020. Crawford seemed to buy into Musk’s new vision for Twitter, posting a photo of herself sleeping on the floor of the office in the weeks following the takeover.
Hearing that the Twitter layoffs last night were well above 50 and hit multiple departments including engineering. If you know more, get in touch.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 26, 2023
Elon Musk has been zealously swinging the axe at Twitter since he took over the site in October. Now, with more than 70 per cent of the company’s original headcount gone, problems seem to be setting in.
Lots of speculation among ex employees that Musk must be about to install a whole new regime and that’s why he is cleaning house. Otherwise the cuts don’t make sense. “Hard to keep the lights on with the people who are still left,” one ex manager told me.
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) February 26, 2023
The app has become increasingly glitchy and unreliable with users around the world unable to post tweets, send messages, or follow new accounts.
Those layoffs have also affected the site’s remaining employees’ effectiveness. Workers have been unable to access tools such as Slack and Jira which were important for scheduling work and troubleshooting problems.
Jira has returned, allowing staff to manage workloads. However, Slack remains cut off.
That’s not all, though. Twitter apparently owes a range of companies millions of dollars in unpaid bills. Events company Blueprint Studios allegedly invoiced Twitter for around US$340,000 (AU$504,000) while AI software company Writer, Inc is claiming it is owed more than US$220,000 (AU$326,000) for subscription fees.
Mergers and acquisition company Innisfree is suing Twitter after it allegedly failed to pay a bill of almost US$2 million (almost AU$3 million). Analysis Group, which provided litigation-related consulting to Twitter and its legal counsel prior to Musk’s takeover, is allegedly owed more than US$2 million.
