Several former TripActions employees say ~100 staff members were fired en masse during a Zoom call, without being told the reason behind the meeting beforehand
Hundreds of tech employees are getting laid off amid the coronavirus outbreak — but now it's all happening over Zoom. Tweets: @edbott , @chrisparry , @pluginfud , @issielapowsky , @djadequate , @ahmed , @moorehn , @issielapowsky , and @caseynewton Tweets: Ed Bott / @edbott : Worst Zoom meeting ever. Jesus, what sort of CEO would think for even a second that this is OK? https://twitter.com/... @chrisparry : These fucking TripActions ghouls raised $700m in equity cash, and got $500m in loan financing last month, and then catapulted their staff at the first chance. https://twitter.com/... elmerFUDD / @pluginfud : Disgusting but on brand for our horrible late stage capitalist society https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : Oooof. “Workers surreally watched as everyone realized what was happening and began processing in their separate Zoom squares, some soundlessly crying.” https://twitter.com/... Russell Asplund / @djadequate : I've learned this the hard way. They want your loyalty, but you are less than nothing to the company you work for. https://twitter.com/... Ahmed Al Omran / @ahmed : Hundreds of tech employees are getting laid off amid the coronavirus outbreak — but now it's all happening over Zoom https://www.protocol.com/... Heidi N. Moore / @moorehn : You see so many tech and media employees wearing their company's merch proudly....remember that your institutional loyalty will never be returned in kind. (Every experienced journo figures this out) https://www.protocol.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : “Many joined the call happily smiling, expecting another team meeting or bonding activity amid the new work from home culture. Instead, according to people on the call, their boss [...] announced that everyone on the call was being laid off.” https://www.protocol.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : We've finally found a worse use of Zoom than sharing porn https://twitter.com/... Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
In late March 2020, with the coronavirus outbreak freezing business travel, TripActions — which had recently raised $700m in equity plus $500m in loan financing, per critics on Twitter — cut roughly 100 employees in a single Zoom call attendees say they were given no reason to expect. The backlash played out publicly through journalists like Ed Bott and Casey Newton, making the meeting itself the story.
The episode turned out to be a template rather than an outlier: days later [[a:952171|Bird ran a two-minute Zoom-webinar layoff of 406 people while locking employees out of their computers mid-meeting]], and by late 2021 [[a:973816|Better.com's Vishal Garg was apologizing for firing ~900 people — 9% of his workforce — the same way]]. What TripActions improvised under pandemic pressure became a repeatable, and repeatedly criticized, playbook.
First-order effects
- Roughly 100 TripActions employees lost their jobs with no advance notice and no individual explanation, learning their fate collectively on a call whose purpose was concealed until it began.
- TripActions' leadership faces immediate reputational damage: the $500m in loan financing raised weeks earlier became the focal point of accusations that well-capitalized companies cut staff first.
Second-order effects
- Competing startups watched the format work — Bird scaled it up within a week, suggesting the Zoom mass-firing spread as a copied cost-cutting mechanism rather than a one-off panic response.
- Public shaming by high-profile journalists on Twitter established that execution quality, not just the layoffs themselves, carries brand and recruiting costs for the companies involved.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the video-call mass layoff becomes institutionalized as a standard instrument of remote-era workforce management — normalizing terminations conducted without individual notice, as later episodes like Twitter's abrupt pre-Thanksgiving engineer firings show the practice extending beyond pandemic emergencies.
- Zoom's own position grows ambivalent: the tool that enabled distributed work also became its termination channel, a tension that resurfaced when Zoom itself began pulling employees back toward offices.
The trend: Mass layoffs are migrating onto video calls, turning a pandemic-era improvisation into a durable — and reputationally fraught — template for how tech companies cut headcount.