Twitter employee, seen sleeping on office floor in viral pic, has now been laid off

Twitter employee Esther Crawford was seen as an Elon Musk loyalist.

Esther Crawford, a senior Twitter employee, whose photo of her sleeping on the office floor had gone viral online last year, has not been spared by Elon Musk in his latest round of layoffs at the social media giant, TechCrunch reported, quoting two journalists.

Twitter Inc has laid off at least 200 employees, or about 10 per cent of its workforce, the New York Times reported. The layoffs impacted product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter's various features online, the NYT report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

“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 and 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 tweeted.
Crawford, who was the director of product management at Twitter, ‘liked’ several tweets lauding her dedication to work and wishing his success for her future endeavours.

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.

— Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) February 27, 2023

In the photo that was viral in November soon after Musk’s first round off mass layoffs at Twitter, Crawford was seen sleeping in a sleeping bag, wearing an eye mask.

"When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines, sometimes you sleep where you work," she had tweeted last November in response when one of her colleagues shared her photo.

When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD

— Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022

Seen as an Elon Musk loyalist, Crawford had been actively tweeting updates about Twitter's new plans.

In one of her tweets, she wrote: "Elon is willing to try lots of things -- many will fail, some will succeed. The goal is to find the right mix of successful changes to ensure the long-term health and growth of the business."

The company has a headcount of about 2,300 active employees, according to Musk last month.

The latest job cuts follow a mass layoff in early November, when Twitter laid off about 3,700 employees in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, who had acquired the company for $44 billion.