Image discovery website Pinterest has sacked two engineers for creating a custom tool to help find out which employees would be laid off in the coming months.
Pinterest has fired two employees for developing a tool to monitor which workers were impacted during recent layoffs.
Last week, the company shared with investors that it would be slashing approximately 15 percent of its workforce, equivalent to around 700 roles, as Pinterest doubles down on strategies involving artificial intelligence (AI).
However, details about which specific employees or teams would be impacted were not revealed.
This led to two engineers developing an internal software tool- in this case, custom computer code-to try and identify affected employees.
Using information from internal communication platforms such as Slack, the tool created alerts for employee names being deactivated or removed from chats and systems.
“After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, 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,” a Pinterest spokesperson said, as reported by CNBC.
“This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”
The layoffs are likely to be completed by the end of September this year. Pinterest will also be reducing its office space as part of a wider restructuring plan focused on freeing up finances to be used for AI projects.
The company has already been focusing heavily on AI to highlight more relevant and personalised content for its clients, build user loyalty, as well as help digital marketing efforts.
Pinterest’s CEO, Bill Ready, slammed the employees in question as being “obstructionist” in a company-wide meeting last week, CNBC reported.
“Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that’s how we make our decisions. But there’s a clear line between constructive debate and behaviour that’s obstructionist,” the publication wrote. The identities of the two employees are unknown as of now.
Euronews Next has contacted Pinterest for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.
Tech layoffs soar amid rising AI competition
Pinterest became the latest tech company to announce layoffs in early 2026. In the last four years, approximately 700,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to a redundancy tracking website, Layoffs.fyi.
One of the main drivers of these cuts for companies like Pinterest has been the surge in AI tools and consumer chatbots from Google and OpenAI, among others, which have increased concerns about diverted users and revenue. The rise of AI agents in shopping has also contributed to this.
Last week, Amazon also slashed 16,000 roles, after letting 14,000 employees go in October.
Ongoing US tariffs have also impacted advertising sales for several global retailers, further driving cost-cutting and widespread restructuring measures.
