Tausi Insider

Amazon.com Inc. AMZN-Q is slashing some Canadian jobs amid what is believed to be the deepest wave of layoffs in the company’s history, as the tech sector scrambles to cut costs amid a months-long downturn. The Seattle e-commerce and cloud-services giant began the layoffs Tuesday, it said. Staff involved in its Alexa voice-assistant team appear to comprise a significant portion of the cuts, according to social-media posts. “We’ve been working over the last few months to further prioritize what matters most to our customers and the business,” wrote Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice-president of devices and services, in a message to staff that the company made public Wednesday. “After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs.” Like many tech executives announcing layoffs in recent months, Mr. Limp attributed Amazon’s decision to “an unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment.” It’s been nearly a year since markets began to turn on the tech s...

Twitter will roll out verified gold and grey check marks as it relaunches the blue check service next Friday, CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. Reuters Twitter Inc is planning to roll out its verified service next Friday with different coloured checks for individuals, companies and governments, after a botched initial launch led to a surge in users impersonating celebrities and brands on the platform. Chief Executive Elon Musk on Friday allotted colours for the categories – gold for companies, grey for governments and a blue check for individuals including celebrities. “Painful, but necessary,” he said, adding that verified accounts will be manually authenticated before a check is activated. The revamped $8-per-month service will allow individuals to have a smaller, secondary logo of their organizations if verified by them, he said in another tweet on Friday. “Longer explanation next week.” The social media platform on Monday delayed its relaunch to make it foolproof as the service is e...

Elon Musk enters Twitter headquarters in San Francisco carrying a sink on Oct. 26. The Associated Press Goran Calic is an associate professor of strategic management at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business. It would be easy to characterize Elon Musk’s approach since taking over Twitter Inc. last month as rash, messy, destructive and unplanned. While such descriptions would be accurate, they would certainly not be complete. What we have been witnessing, in public and in real time, is a live demonstration of the way Mr. Musk runs a business. He has generally managed his other ventures very successfully – especially in terms of growth, if not always in terms of profit. Tesla Inc. continues to build factories and deliver cars and SpaceX rockets continue to supply the International Space Station with materials and astronauts. It’s important to keep two things in mind while following the Twitter drama: The company was already in serious trouble and Mr. Musk’s style, though vol...

Twitter Inc.’s public policy chief has left the company amid additional layoffs to the unit on Thursday, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as billionaire owner Elon Musk continues to slash costs. Sinead McSweeney, global vice president for public policy, has left Twitter, according to two sources. McSweeney’s departure has not been previously reported. The layoffs and departures of a high-ranking leader comes as regulators around the globe question Twitter’s content moderation work and protection of user data after Musk cut the staff from more than 7,000 to under 2,000. The public policy team is responsible for interacting with lawmakers and civil society on issues including free speech, privacy and online safety. It handles requests from governments and civil rights groups to remove problematic content and sets rules to protect vulnerable users. With fewer staff, backlogs could increase and some policies in development could be ignored, one of the sources said. Nick Pic...

Twitter Inc. made further staff cuts in the trust and safety team handling global content moderation and in the unit related to hate speech and harassment, Bloomberg news reported on Saturday. At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Those laid off at the social-media platform owned by Elon Musk include Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, a relatively recent hire as head of site integrity for the Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy, Bloomberg reported. Workers on teams handling policy on misinformation, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated, the report added. Twitter’s vice-president of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, confirmed to Reuters that Twitter made some cuts in the trust and safety team on Friday night but did not give details. “We have thousands of people within Trust and Safety who work co...

Twitter Inc said on Wednesday that there was no evidence that data recently being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in the company’s systems. Twitter said the data of 5.4 million of the accounts had been compromised by a bug it discovered early last year, which it previously fixed and disclosed over the summer. Another 600 million pieces of user data “could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident,” Twitter said in a blog post. “There is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources,” it said. The social media company told users in August last year that a system vulnerability revealed Twitter accounts of users by submitting their email address or phone number, after the company learnt about it through a bug bounty program months earlier. In December, media reports...

Tom Keiser, the Zendesk Inc. alumni, has run Hootsuite since mid-2020. Handout Vancouver social-media dashboard company Hootsuite Inc. replaced its chief executive officer and began its third major round of layoffs in six months Wednesday amid one of the worst weeks for Canadian tech workers since the sector’s downturn began in late 2021. Hootsuite confirmed to Tausi Insider that it would lay off about 70 people, or about 7 per cent of its work force. This follows a more significant round of layoffs in August, where nearly 400 of its then-1,400 staff lost their jobs, which was followed by another 50 people losing positions in the fall. The company also announced former CareerBuilder Inc. chief executive Irina Novoselsky as its new chief executive, replacing Tom Keiser, the Zendesk Inc. alumnus who has run the company since mid-2020. Also on Wednesday, the charitable- donation -management company Benevity Inc. said it would lay off 137 people, or 14 per cent of its staff. It was one o...

A Google office in Toronto in 2018. COLE BURSTON /The Canadian Press Google and YouTube parent Alphabet Inc. GOOG-Q is cutting about 12,000 jobs worldwide, including in Canada, as the company confronts a slowdown in its rapid growth amid an economic downturn hitting the technology sector with a series of blows. The cuts, which amount to 6 per cent of the California-based internet giant’s global work force, are piling on top of a brutal week of massive layoffs across the tech industry. Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. AMZN-Q this week started its biggest-ever round of job cuts, culling 18,000 workers. And Washington-based Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q is slashing 10,000 employees as it also cuts costs. It is a continuation of the layoffs that first swept across the tech sector last year, when Meta Platforms Inc. META-Q, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, announced cuts of about 11,000 jobs and beleaguered social media network Twitter Inc. let go more than half of its employees. Ca...

A Google office in Toronto in 2018. COLE BURSTON /The Canadian Press Google and YouTube parent Alphabet Inc. GOOG-Q is cutting about 12,000 jobs worldwide, including in Canada, as the company confronts a slowdown in its rapid growth amid an economic downturn hitting the technology sector with a series of blows. The cuts, which amount to 6 per cent of the California-based internet giant’s global work force, are piling on top of a brutal week of massive layoffs across the tech industry. Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. AMZN-Q this week started its biggest-ever round of job cuts, culling 18,000 workers. And Washington-based Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q is slashing 10,000 employees as it also cuts costs. It is a continuation of the layoffs that first swept across the tech sector last year, when Meta Platforms Inc. META-Q, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, announced cuts of about 11,000 jobs and beleaguered social media network Twitter Inc. let go more than half of its employees. Ca...