Ars Technica: Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years. “Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email Monday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10.”
CNN: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email. “Google (GOOGL), which for years ranked as the top company to work for in the United States, laid off thousands of workers by e-mail. And not just any employees: Decades-long veterans of the company, at least one employee on health leave, and even an employee in labor with her second child were all cut, with little explanation.”
Bloomberg: Google Employees Petition Pichai for Better Handling of Job Cuts. “Almost 1,400 employees at Google parent Alphabet Inc. have signed a petition calling for better treatment of staff during the layoff process, after the company announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs.”
CNBC: Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees. “Google is indicating to ex-staffers, who got laid off while on maternity and medical leave, that they won’t get paid for all of their remaining time off, according to former employees and written correspondence shared with CNBC.”
Reuters: Swiss Google Workers Stage Walkout as Job Cuts Hit Europe . “Hundreds of Google employees staged a walkout on Wednesday at the company’s office in Zurich, Switzerland, after more than 200 workers were laid off.”
Ars Technica: Report: Microsoft cut a key AI ethics team. “An entire team responsible for making sure that Microsoft’s AI products are shipped with safeguards to mitigate social harms was cut during the company’s most recently layoff of 10,000 employees, Platformer reported.”
CNN: Elon Musk publicly mocks Twitter worker with disability who is unsure whether he’s been laid off. “Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. It’s the latest example of the billionaire openly antagonizing his company’s current and former staffers.”
Engadget: Google workers in Japan have joined a labor union in response to planned layoffs. “Dozens of Google Japan employees have organized under the Tokyo Managers’ Union. It’s the first labor union at Google Japan, according to Meiji University Assistant Professor Ken Yamazaki, who also posted a copy of the group’s statements from a press conference. Apparently, the employees chose to organize out of fear that they could be abruptly laid off, especially since some of them are in Japan on work visas.”
New York Times: ‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise
. “In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.”
Business Insider: Elon Musk faces upward of $130 million in legal costs to fight laid-off Twitter workers over severance pay. “The full process of arbitration, which companies commonly require employees to agree to as a private alternative to more public litigation, typically costs about $100,000, according to several law firms. Arbitration costs are often the employer’s burden, as employees often can’t afford the high cost of what an employer is essentially forcing them to do. Given that, Musk could see upward of $130 million in costs to individually arbitrate the employee cases filed so far.”
Reuters: Twitter lays off at least 50 in relentless cost cuts, The Information reports . “The job cuts impacted multiple engineering teams, including those supporting advertising technology, the main Twitter app as well as technical infrastructure to keep Twitter’s systems up and running, the report in the U.S. technology focused publication said early on Sunday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter.”
The Verge: Elon Musk keeps laying off Twitter employees after saying cuts were done. “On November 21st, Elon Musk gathered Twitter’s remaining employees at its San Francisco headquarters to tell them that, after forcing out roughly two-thirds of the workforce in a matter of weeks, layoffs were over. He keeps laying people off anyway.”
Washington Post: AI is starting to pick who gets laid off. “Google says there was ‘no algorithm involved’ in their job cut decisions. But former employees are not wrong to wonder, as a fleet of artificial intelligence tools become ingrained in office life. Human resources managers use machine learning software to analyze millions of employment related data points, churning out recommendations of who to interview, hire, promote or help retain.”
Bloomberg: Twitter Shuts Delhi, Mumbai Offices, Asks Staff To Work From Home: Report. “Twitter Inc. has shut two of its three India offices and told its staff to work from home, underscoring Elon Musk’s mission to slash costs and get the struggling social media service in the black. Twitter, which fired more than 90% of its roughly 200-plus staff in India late last year, closed its offices in the political center New Delhi and financial hub of Mumbai, people aware of the matter said.”
Gizmodo: ‘Inaccurate Calculation’ Leaves Laid Off Google Employees Confused About Severance Package. “Google miscalculated the number of stocks laid-off employees were told they would receive as part of a severance package last month. The company laid off 12,000 employees, marking the largest round of layoffs since Google’s inception.”
