A recent round of job cuts at a major social media company has led to internal disciplinary action, highlighting growing tensions around transparency, privacy, and data access during workforce reductions.
Pinterest has terminated 2 engineers after they tracked which employees were laid off during a recent restructuring. The company confirmed that the engineers accessed confidential internal data and shared details of dismissed staff more widely within the organisation.
The layoffs were announced earlier through an internal email from chief executive Bill Ready, who said he was “doubling down on an AI-forward approach,” according to an employee who shared parts of the memo on LinkedIn. Pinterest later told investors that the cuts would affect about 15% of its workforce, or roughly 700 roles, without naming specific teams or individuals.
According to a Pinterest spokesperson, “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.” The spokesperson added, “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”
In this context, a script refers to computer code used to automate tasks or modify how internal software works. A person familiar with the firings said the engineers targeted internal communication tools. The script flagged employee names that were being removed or deactivated from systems similar to the workplace messaging platform Slack. This gave early insight into who had lost their jobs.
The source requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. The identities of the 2 dismissed engineers are not public, and they could not be reached for comment.
Monitoring internal tools to see which colleagues disappear from shared channels has become a common, informal way for employees to track layoffs in the technology sector. The incident comes amid wider job losses across the industry.
In the same week Pinterest announced its cuts, Amazon eliminated 16,000 roles in its second round of layoffs in 3 months. Earlier this year, Meta cut several hundred jobs. Google and Microsoft have also made significant workforce reductions.
Across the global tech sector, an estimated 700,000 employees have been laid off over the past 4 years, according to Layoffs.fyi, a platform that tracks reported job cuts.
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