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Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April . The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.

But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.

Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol , an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple, which has thus far avoided the sweeping layoffs that have taken place at rival companies like Microsoft and Google, is eliminating some roles after all, according to a report in Bloomberg .

The number of heads eliminated is believed to be relatively small, and they are all within the company's "corporate retail teams," with a focus on workers who are responsible for the "construction and upkeep" of Apple's retail locations and other physical facilities.

In a note to employees, the company said the move was actually intended to improve store upkeep. Additionally, Apple told the affected employees that they can reapply for other roles within the company. Those who aren't accepted for new roles will receive four months of severance.

Enlarge / Amazon has announced 27,000 layoffs since November 2022. (credit: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

Amazon will fire another 9,000 workers in the coming weeks. The news was delivered in an email from company CEO Andy Jassy to employees this morning and follows large cuts in November and again in January .

In his email to staff, Jassy wrote that most of the job cuts will come in four parts of the company: Amazon Web Services or AWS; "People Experience and Technology Solutions"; advertising; and the game-streaming platform Twitch, which has been owned by the Internet behemoth since 2014 . Those areas of the company were also heavily affected by the earlier layoffs, which involved 18,000 workers.

"This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," Jassy wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive’s disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson.

Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had “never lived up to its potential.” Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.

“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” Musk tweeted. “It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.”

Enlarge / A customized Waymo minivan being shown off at the 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. (credit: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images )

When will the Alphabet layoffs end? Layoffs are always hard, but usually you want to do these things in one big cleave, letting employees know the cuts are over so they can stop worrying and get back to work. Google had its initial big set of layoffs in January, when it cut 12,000 jobs , and employees were supposed to be quickly told of the cuts once that announcement was made. It's March now, and more cuts are still trickling in. Last week, Alphabet's " Everyday Robots " subsidiary was shut down, and the entire staff was laid off. This week Waymo is going through a second round of layoffs.

Reuters reports the self-driving car company has cut another 137 staff members, bringing the total cuts at the Alphabet subsidiary to 8 percent this year, or 209 total employees. Waymo said the cuts would let it “focus on commercial success,” something that has escaped Waymo previously.

Waymo has been around for 14 years now, but it hasn't had much in the way of "commercial success." It is absolutely the leader in self-driving car technology, and reaching a point where it could be widely rolled out would make Waymo an incredible amount of money. It could revolutionize trucking, disrupt Uber and Lyft—which have to pay drivers—and could result in a ton of licensed technology deals with car manufacturers. Getting there is a long road with no end in sight, though.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu )

More engineers, product managers, and data scientists are out at Twitter, as another round of layoffs has slashed 10 percent of the remaining staff, The New York Times reported . Multiple sources familiar with the matter told the Times that 200 employees were affected.

On Saturday night—just as it happened during Twitter’s November layoffs —some employees discovered they were about to lose their jobs when they were abruptly logged out of corporate email accounts and laptops. Now there are fewer than 2,000 employees left, it’s estimated.

Among those impacted is Esther Crawford, who enthusiastically embraced Twitter CEO Elon Musk's vision of Twitter 2.0 and proved to be so hardcore that she became the chief executive of Twitter Payments, Financial Times reported . In November, Musk told staff there were no plans for more layoffs and pointed to Twitter Payments—a product that would support peer-to-peer payments and e-commerce on the platform—as the product that would save Twitter from going broke . Now, the Twitter Payments team has dropped from a staff of 30 to fewer than eight, the Times reported, making it unclear if the product is still a top priority as Twitter's money struggles drag on .

Enlarge / The fourth-generation Echo device is a cloth-covered sphere with a halo at the base, contrasting with the squat plastic cylinders of earlier-generation Echoes. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs . One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider , which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division."

Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

A division in crisis

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff | Getty Images News )

Before layoffs began at Twitter, employees had already filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Twitter violated federal and California laws by not giving staff proper notice before termination. This lawsuit was widely reported, but it’s still unlikely that every employee affected by layoffs is aware they’re eligible to join the lawsuit. That’s a problem, according to Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing Twitter staff suing, who says that any employee who doesn’t join the lawsuit might end up agreeing to a worse separation deal than Twitter originally promised them.

“We have amended our class-action complaint against Twitter,” Liss-Riordan told Ars. “Since we originally filed the complaint last Thursday, it has now become clear that Twitter has broken promises to employees.”

According to Liss-Riordan, Twitter told laid-off employees they “would receive the same severance pay and benefits they would have received under Twitter’s previous ownership,” but it now appears that’s not true. Twitter’s prior policy was to provide “at least two months' severance (or more, based on years of service), as well as bonuses, equity, and other benefits,” Liss-Riordan said, but Musk’s Twitter told employees given the official termination date of January 4, 2023, that they would only get one month’s severance pay.

Enlarge (credit: VIEW press / Contributor | Corbis News )

A day after it was reported that Twitter would lay off 50 percent of staff , Twitter has temporarily shut down its offices to begin layoffs. Some staff told Reuters that hundreds of employees who got this news yesterday immediately logged into Slack to say goodbyes before access was removed. Other workers told Reuters that the content moderation team is expected to be hit hard by layoffs.

One Twitter user whose bio says he formerly served as a Twitter senior community manager tweeted to mark the moment he lost company Slack access . That Twitter staffer assumed that losing Slack access confirmed he was no longer employed but won’t know for sure until today, when employees will find out if they’re fired when they receive an email to their personal inbox. Every employee expected to stick around Twitter will receive an email to their work inbox.

Those email announcements are expected to arrive by noon ET on Friday, according to a Twitter internal email reviewed by Reuters, which informed Twitter staff, "In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday."