{"id":66428,"date":"2026-02-04T18:30:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T18:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/pinterest-sacks-workers-for-creating-tool-to-track-layoffs"},"modified":"2026-02-04T19:22:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T19:22:20","slug":"pinterest-sacks-workers-for-creating-tool-to-track-layoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/pinterest-sacks-workers-for-creating-tool-to-track-layoffs","title":{"rendered":"Pinterest sacks workers for creating tool to track layoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Lesotho. <\/strong> <\/span>Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs.<\/p>\n

The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn.<\/p>\n

Pinterest told investors the move would impact about 15% of the workforce, or roughly 700 roles, without saying which teams or workers were affected.<\/p>\n

But then “two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly,” a company spokesperson told the BBC.<\/p>\n

“This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy,” the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n

A script in this sense is essentially computer code written to automate a task within existing software or tweak its functionality for a specific purpose.<\/p>\n

The script written by the Pinterest engineers was aimed at internal tools used at the company for employees to communicate, according to a person familiar with the firings who asked not to be identified.<\/p>\n

The person said the script created an alert for which employee names within a tool like the team communication platform Slack were being removed or deactivated, giving some insight into who at the company was impacted by the layoffs.<\/p>\n

The identities of the two sacked engineers are not publicly known and the BBC has been unable to contact them.<\/p>\n

The technology industry has seen waves of layoffs in recent years.<\/p>\n

Checking Slack and other internal tools for coworkers who disappear from channels of conversation is a common way for people to learn who is no longer working at a company.<\/p>\n

In the same week that Pinterest announced it was laying off workers, Amazon cut 16,000 roles in its second round of redundancies in three months.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Meta also laid off several hundred employees.<\/p>\n

Along with Amazon and Meta, Google, Microsoft and others have significantly cut their workforces.<\/p>\n

Across the entire tech industry, an estimated 700,000 people have been laid off over the last four years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks all reports of such cuts.<\/p>\n

Find more news and analyses on Lesotho<\/span> on the Africa Press<\/span> website<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Lesotho. Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who posted some of the memo on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":66427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[245],"class_list":["post-66428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-miscellaneous","tag-lesotho"],"yoast_head":"\nPinterest sacks workers for creating tool to track layoffs - Lesotho<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"-article-header-tag"> Africa-Press - Lesotho. 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