As Snapchat parent company Snap struggles to contain the fallout from a “cataclysmic” redesign, its stock isn’t the only metric that’s hit an all-time low. In a recent internal survey, as many as 40 percent of Snap’s 3,000-odd staffers said they planned to leave the company—up from 11 percent in the first quarter, a historic slump in employee morale. Seventy-five percent of Snap’s workforce said they’re still satisfied with their jobs, per the survey. But the results nonetheless indicate that Evan Spiegel could have a burgeoning crisis on his hands. “It’s easy to blame a redesign, a one-time mistake in the past,” Yih Lee, a former Snap employee, tweeted after Cheddar broke the news on Wednesday. “But at some point, management has to take responsibility for the culture they built, the poor leadership they propped up, and the low morale they ignored.”

That morale took a beating in March, when Snap fired about 120 engineers, after previously laying off staffers in its hardware and content departments. Its attrition problem has extended to the ranks of company executives, too. In September, Imran Khan, Snap’s chief strategy officer, became the latest in a long line of executives to jump ship. Insiders characterized his departure as a huge blow: “You can’t underestimate the importance of Imran to Snapchat,” one person with knowledge of the company told me at the time. Nor was he alone. In May, Chief Financial Officer Drew Vollero stepped down to pursue other opportunities, and in July, the company’s vice president of hardware, Mark Randall, left to start his own company. Other departures have included head of sales Jeff Lucas, who reportedly stepped down to “pursue a new challenge”; Chris Handman, the company’s first general counsel; Tim Sehn, Snap’s senior V.P. of engineering; and V.P. of product Tom Conrad.

According to Cheddar, Snap executives have done their best to downplay employees’ concerns about morale. Jerry Hunter, Snap’s engineering chief, has told them that Snap’s turnover rate is normal for the industry. (The average yearly turnover rate in Internet tech is 14.9 percent.) It’s unclear whether this is the case—Snap has yet to make its yearly turnover rate public—but if employees are wavering, it’s hard to blame them. The company’s problems are manifold. Snap reported a decline in daily active users in the second quarter, and earlier this month, an analyst predicted that it could be in such dire straits next year that it will need to beg for cash: “While it is obvious that Snap wasn’t prepared for life as a public company, it now has a more pressing problem,” Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to clients, obtained by CNBC. “It is quickly running out of money.” (Snap did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.)

At present, shareholders are waiting on tenterhooks for Snap to release its Thursday earnings report. If its active-user numbers decline again, advertisers are reportedly poised to flee. “Some advertisers are less enthusiastic about Snapchat than they used to be,” Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, told Bloomberg. “They do feel that they get a bigger audience and potentially better tools from Instagram, and that’s super attractive to them.” If advertisers do jump ship, the blame lies squarely with Spiegel—though Snapchat disputed that he was blind to the threat, multiple sources told Bloomberg back in August that the Snap C.E.O. “refused” to believe Instagram’s copycat features were siphoning growth away from Snapchat. Ultimately, Spiegel’s purported hubris could be responsible not only for his company’s downward spiral, but for his failure to keep people on board. “No exec challenges Evan,” a former Snap employee told Bloomberg. “No exec who lasts over a month, anyway.”

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