Twitter just lost four of its top executives

We won’t know until later today what exactly happened at Twitter on Sunday, but we do know that whatever it was, it resulted in the departure of four of the company’s top executives, including the head of Vine. The departure of media head Katie Jacobs Stanton and product head Kevin Weil were first reported by Re/code on Sunday morning, with the New York Times following up with a report claiming that senior vice president of engineering Alex Roetter and head of Vine Jason Toff are also leaving the company. As I said before, we don’t know why this unexpected shake-up happened, and though Re/code claims to have a good idea of why, it prefers to refrain from speculation of that nature. 

In a major executive upheaval, two of Twitter’s top executives — media head Katie Jacobs Stanton and product head Kevin Weil — are departing the company, according to sources close to the situation. Neither has immediate plans to go to another company, added sources, but are expected to. Right now, the jobs of both Weil and Stanton will be filled with interim replacements. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment. There have been rumblings of the changes for weeks now inside the San Francisco social communications company. Sources said Twitter is planning to announce the shuffle tomorrow, along with the hire of a prominent CMO. Sources said she was a well-known exec from a big brand company, but Re/code could not determine who that is. In any case, we’ll know tomorrow, along with how Twitter is planning on positioning the pair of key departures. In the past, unlike other companies, it has sometimes been publicly rough on those leaving, such as communications head Gabriel Stricker and Ali Rowghani. Both Stanton (who has worked in big media jobs at both Google and Yahoo before coming to Twitter) and Weil (who came from CoolIris in 2009) are well-regarded both inside and outside the company.