Author: David Reyes

The Cloudflare announcement was made on a Wednesday, which is the type of midweek time that businesses seem to favor when they want news to spread swiftly. Together, the numbers were odd. $639.8 million in revenue, a 34% increase over the previous year. In fact, the net loss had increased. Then, practically simultaneously, the business informed over 1,100 employees that they would not be returning. Even though Cloudflare claims there isn’t a contradiction, it’s difficult to ignore it. The news was shared on the company blog by Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn, who co-founded this business over a period of…

At 6:55 a.m. on a Tuesday, the email reached recipients before the majority of San Francisco’s coffee shops had even opened. About 700 employees at Coinbase knew their time there was essentially over by the time they had finished reading it. Chief executive and co-founder Brian Armstrong presented the cuts as a component of a broader reinvention. Beneath the words, the cryptocurrency community perceived something different. The language used in tech layoff memos has changed, making it difficult to ignore. Businesses used to blame the economy. Then they attributed the pandemic to overhiring. In 2026, the blame is now subtly…

Meta has become two businesses at once, somewhere between the jubilant tone of an earnings call and the subdued dread of a Thursday afternoon all-hands. One is the version that Mark Zuckerberg frequently discusses on stage, one that is illuminated by advances in artificial intelligence and optimistic forecasts regarding productivity. The other is the one being typed about, anonymously, late at night on Blind, where the words “dead and depressing” now sit at the top of a thread about a company that, not long ago, employees fought to get into. A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers.…

The news came in bits and pieces, as these things now frequently do. This is a post on LinkedIn. On X, a brief, cautious farewell. It was evident that something had occurred within Second Dinner, the Irvine-based studio that created one of the most captivating mobile card games of the previous few years, by the time the larger Marvel Snap community made the connection last week. People were missing from their desks. Griffin Bennett, the community manager, had left. According to what former employees have posted online, so were others, dispersed throughout engineering, QA, and community roles. On May 1,…

It’s the kind of detail that people remember years later: the call came at noon on a Wednesday. The day before, a few staff members at KPMG’s US advisory practice received the calendar invite without an agenda, which is typically all you need to know. Approximately 400 consultants were informed that their positions had been eliminated by the end of the meeting. The majority of them were employed in financial services, customer operations, or regulatory risk advisory—divisions that had been silently slowing down for months. Although it would be tempting to describe this as shocking, it isn’t. Anyone observing the…

When a warehouse goes dark, a certain kind of silence descends upon a small Southern town. The half-empty parking lot during shift change, the forklifts operating a little more slowly, the rumor that spreads from the break room to the gas station before management ever confirms anything—you can almost feel it before the official notice is sent out. Right now, Lexington, North Carolina, is sitting in that silence. Vitacost submitted a WARN notice to the state on April 29. The lights at 130 Lexington Parkway will be permanently turned off by July 1. 130 employees were removed from the payroll.…

The Daily Wire didn’t give the first indication that something wasn’t right. It originated from a post made on Friday afternoon by Cameron Arcand, a political reporter, who casually mentioned that he had recently been laid off and was searching for new employment in Washington, D.C. The remainder of the story started to leak out in a matter of hours. The Nashville headquarters, which Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing had so successfully moved from California in 2020, had been destroyed by the time the company released its formal statement on May 1. As this develops, there’s a feeling that something…

In a brief startup pitch I saw a few weeks ago, the founder casually referred to his product as “a chatbot that talks like your grandmother after she’s gone.” He described it as a meal kit subscription. Nothing dramatic. Not even a pause. It’s just another construction project. And it stayed with me because the peculiar thing about it wasn’t the product itself, but rather how commonplace it sounded. While most of us were busy debating whether AI would replace human labor, the engineering community quietly caught up to the idea of digital immortality, which has been present in movies…

The way people discuss their jobs at dinner parties reflects the current state of unease. It’s always brought up by someone. Half-laughing, a friend who works in marketing says that her company has begun “experimenting” with AI tools. For a very long time, no one laughs back. The question remains unanswered as the conversation awkwardly switches to sports or the weather. The statistics that underlie that discomfort are beginning to emerge. The Washington Post published a recent study from GovAI and the Brookings Institution in March that mapped American occupations along two axes: exposure to AI and adaptability. It’s not…

He Xiaopeng cut open the leg of his robot in front of a live audience, even though he didn’t have to. The humanoid moved with such eerie grace when XPeng unveiled IRON in Guangzhou last November—a tiny hip sway, a flicker of weight shifting from one foot to another—that online viewers accused him of stuffing a person inside a costume. He thus unveiled it on stage. servos, joints, and wires. The audience chuckled. He appeared relieved. This brief, somewhat dramatic moment seems to encapsulate the current state of China’s AI industry, which is defensive about being questioned, eager to prove…