The company was secretive about who gets fired from Pinterest, so workers took matters into their own hands.
Pinterest, a visual search engine used by around 600 million monthly active users worldwide, fired two of its engineers who had identified who was getting laid off in a recent round of job cuts.
At the beginning of this year, Pinterest announced it was laying off up to 15% of its employees.
This means that around 700 workers would be left jobless. The decision was made after the company decided to “double down on an AI-forward approach,” as shared by Pinterest CEO Bill Ready to the company’s employees.
While the company warned its employees, it didn’t specify which workers or teams would be affected.
This is when two engineers working at Pinterest wrote scripts to access confidential information, which revealed the names of fired employees, and then shared it further, the company’s spokesperson told the BBC.
The script or computer code the engineers wrote was adapted to the tools the company used for communication, such as Slack, a workplace communication app.
The script then alerted engineers whenever a name was removed or deactivated from a platform, suggesting the person had been fired by the company, a person familiar with the matter explained to the news outlet.
The names of the two engineers who were fired for essentially violating Pinterest's privacy policy are not yet known.
Pinterest first announced its layoffs at the end of January, expecting to complete them by the end of September 30th, 2026.
Pinterest isn’t the only company letting its employees go. In its recent layoff, Amazing laid off 16,000 employees.
It has previously been reported that Amazon is preparing for a second round of job cuts following the October round, when the company fired around 14,000 employees.
Perhaps the second round of layoffs didn’t come as a surprise because the company accidentally sent an email to thousands of Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees about the upcoming layoffs. That was done before the move was even officially announced.
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