Foursquare, the location-focused outfit that in 2020 merged with Factual, another location-focused outfit, is joining the parade of companies to make cuts to one of its biggest cost centers – employees – in 2024. Per an email sent out to staffers this afternoon by current CEO Gary Little and viewed by TechCrunch, 105 employees were […]
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Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company. Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Motional is pausing commercial operations and delaying plans to launch a robotaxi service with its next-gen Hyundai Ioniq 5 robotaxis until 2026 as it […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company. Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that Motional is pausing commercial operations and delaying plans to launch a robotaxi service with its next-gen Hyundai Ioniq 5 robotaxis until 2026 as it […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sprinklr, a U.S. firm offering a customer experience management platform to global brands, has laid off about 3% of its workforce — around 116 people — to realign its customer operations team, the company confirmed to TechCrunch in a statement. The new job cuts come over a year after the company cut about 4% of its headcount in February last year.
The New York-headquartered company, which counts Microsoft, Samsung, P&G and over 60% of the Fortune 100 companies globally as customers, started notifying affected employees in markets including the U.S. and India about its decision on Thursday, TechCrunch exclusively learned and confirmed with the company through an email.
“Sprinklr made the strategic business decision to realign our headcount across our customer operations organization,” a company spokesperson said. “While these decisions are hard to make, they reflect the commitments we’ve outlined to restructure our business to accelerate our go-to-market efficiencies and better serve customers.”
The spokesperson confirmed that the job cuts did not affect C-level roles.
Sprinklr did not disclose the exact number of employees being laid off. According to its recent 10K filing (PDF), the company had 3,869 employees worldwide as of January 31. Of the total workforce, Sprinklr had 2,276 employees in India, 787 in the U.S. and 3,082 internationally.
“The restructuring will be done in accordance with local and country laws. This difficult, but necessary, action ensures we are aligned to our prioritized growth areas while supporting customers where they live and operate,” the spokesperson stated.
In March, Sprinklr reported a 17% year-on-year increase in its quarterly revenue for Q4 to $194.2 million from $165.3 million a year ago. The company also garnered GAAP operating income of $18.5 million compared to an operating loss of $1.8 million a year ago.
“While we will continue to hire in prioritized areas to support our growth, scale, and long-term success, our first priority is to support employees with the greatest care and respect, show appreciation for their contributions to Sprinklr, and to assist them in their transition. We will then continue our focus on strengthening our foundation, fostering innovation and enhancing our execution to drive value for our customers and shareholders,” the spokesperson said.
On Friday, Sprinklr was trading at $12.10 per share with a market cap of $3.30 billion.
Google has terminated the employment of 28 employees following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices.
The protests were in response to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by Google and Amazon with the Israeli government and its military three years ago. The controversial project, which also reportedly includes the provision of advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, allegedly has strict contractual stipulations that prevent Google and Amazon from bowing to boycott pressure — this effectively means that they must continue providing services to Israel no matter what.
There have been countless protests and public chastising from within the companies’ ranks since 2021, but with the heightening Israel-Palestine conflict in the wake of last October’s attacks by Hamas, this is spilling further into the workforce of corporations deemed not only to be helping Israel, but actively profiteering from the conflict.
While the latest rallies included demonstrations outside Google’s Sunnyvale and New York offices, as well as Amazon’s Seattle HQ, protestors went one step further by going inside the buildings, including the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
In a statement issued to TechCrunch via anti big-tech advocacy firm Justice Speaks, Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer participating in the New York City sit-in protest, said that by providing cloud and AI infrastructure to the Israeli military, Google is “directly implicated in the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
“It’s my responsibility to do everything I can to end this contract even while Google pretends nothing is wrong,” Ibraheem said. “The idea of working for a company that directly provides infrastructure for genocide makes me sick. We’ve tried sending petitions to leadership but they’ve gone ignored. We will make sure they can’t ignore us anymore. We will make as much noise as possible. So many workers don’t know that Google has this contract with the IOF [Israel Offensive Forces]. So many don’t know that their colleagues have been facing harassment for being Muslim, Palestinian and Arab and speaking out. So many people don’t realize how complicit their own company is. It’s our job to make sure they do.”
Nine Google workers were also arrested and forcibly removed from the company’s offices, four of whom were in New York and five in Sunnyvale. A separate statement issued by Justice Speaks on behalf of the so-called “Nimbus nine” protestors, said that they had demanded to speak with Kurian, a request that went unmet.
The statement reads in full:
“Last night, Google made the decision to arrest us, the company’s own workers — instead of engaging with our concerns about Project Nimbus, the company’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with Israel. Those of us sitting in Thomas Kurian’s office repeatedly requested to speak with the Google Cloud CEO, but our requests were denied. Throughout the past three years, since the contract’s signing, we have repeatedly attempted to engage with Google executives about Project Nimbus through company channels, including town halls, forums, petitions signed by over a thousand workers, and direct outreach from concerned workers.
Google executives have ignored our concerns about our ethical responsibility for the impact of our technology as well as the damage to our workplace health and safety caused by this contract, and the company’s internal environment of retaliation, harassment, and bullying. At every turn, instead, Google is repressing speech inside the company, and condoning harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Googlers.
Workers have the right to know how their labor is being used, and to have a say in ensuring the technology they build is not used for harm. Workers also have the right to go to work without fear, anxiety, and stress due to the potential that their labor is being used to power a genocide. Google is depriving us of these basic rights, which is what led us to sit-in at offices across the country yesterday.
Meanwhile, Google continues to lie to its workers, the media, and the public. Google continues to claim, as of yesterday, that Project Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Yet, reporting from TIME Magazine proves otherwise. Google has built custom tools for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and has doubled down on contracting with the Israeli Occupational Forces, Israel’s military, since the start of its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. By continuing its lies, Google is disrespecting and disregarding consumers, the media, as well as, most importantly, us—its workers.
We will not stay silent in light of Google’s bare-faced lies. Hundreds and thousands of Google workers have joined No Tech for Apartheid’s call for the company to Drop Project Nimbus. Despite Google’s attempts to silence us and disregard our concerns, we will persist. We will continue to organize and fight until Google drops Project Nimbus and stops aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide and apartheid state in Palestine.”
A Google spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that 28 employees were fired, and that it will “continue to investigate and take action” if needed.
“These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” the spokesperson said. “A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations. Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”
Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet.
Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Özfidan and Egemen Koçhisarlı with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service that was storing internal information relating to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems.
But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet.
Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations “could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use,” Yoleri said.
The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.
When reached by email, a spokesperson for Microsoft did not provide comment by the time of publication. In a statement shared after publication on Wednesday, Microsoft’s Jeff Jones told TechCrunch: “Though the credentials should not have been exposed, they were temporary, accessible only from internal networks, and disabled after testing. We thank our partners for responsibly reporting this issue.”
Jones did not say for how long the cloud server was exposed to the internet, or if anyone other than SOCRadar discovered the exposed data inside.
This is the latest security gaffe at Microsoft as the company tries to rebuild trust with its customers after a series of cloud security incidents in recent years. In a similar security lapse last year, researchers found that Microsoft employees were exposing their own corporate network logins in code published to GitHub.
Microsoft also came under fire last year after the company admitted it did not know how China-backed hackers stole an internal email signing key that allowed the hackers broad access to Microsoft-hosted inboxes of senior U.S. government officials. An independent board of cyber experts tasked with investigating the email breach wrote in their report, published last week, that the hackers succeeded because of a “cascade of security failures at Microsoft.”
In March, Microsoft said that it continues to counter an ongoing cyberattack that allowed Russian state-backed hackers to steal portions of the company’s source code and internal emails from Microsoft corporate executives.
Updated with comment from Microsoft.
Apple is laying off 614 employees in California after abandoning its electric car project. According to the WARN notice posted by the California Employment Development Department, Apple notified the affected employees on March 28 and the changes will go into effect on May 27. Affected employees worked at eight locations in Santa Clara, roughly 45 miles south of San Francisco.
Although the notice doesn’t specify which projects the employees were working on, Bloomberg reports that most of the affected employees were working at buildings related to its canceled car project, while others were working at a facility for its next-generation screen development.
Apple wound down both of these projects toward the end of February. The company started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014, and told employees that it was canceling it on February 27. Bloomberg reported at the time that some remaining employees who were working on the car project would be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects.
Around the same time, Apple reportedly ended efforts to design and develop its own next-generation displays. The displays were supposed to be added to the company’s Apple Watch before potentially going into the company’s other devices.
The layoffs mark Apple’s first major round of job cuts post-pandemic.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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