Earthlink just announced layoffs. I’ve heard the numbers 500 people and 900 people thrown around, but don’t have any confirmation yet. It’s 900. Here’s text of the announcement from Earthling:
Today, we announced changes to EarthLink’s corporate structure that better position us to operate profitably and focus on the heart of our business: delivering award-winning Internet tools and services to our customers. These changes will affect all of us — both our friends and colleagues who will leave EarthLink, and those who will remain. I am grateful for the hard work and care that all of our employees have contributed in their tenure here, and we are seeking to make the transition as smooth as possible for everyone involved.
If you are a customer, these changes will not impact the level of reliability and service and support you have come to expect from EarthLink. If you are a partner, nothing in terms of our relationship has changed; what’s changed is that we’ve right-sized our business to better compete in today’s marketplace.
Sincerely,
Rolla Huff
I’ve been told employees will find out around 3 p.m. who gets to stay and who doesn’t. I have several friends who work there, and I hope this turns out okay for them one way or the other. If any of you want me to shop your resumés around, please email me.
Here are some other sources of info about “Black Tuesday”:
- For Earthlink Black Tuesday Looms: Job cuts, restructuring
- Rumor Control: EarthLink As Acquisition Bait? (several employees left comments here)
- Earthlink to cut 900 jobs
My employer is looking for people, too, so PM types or QA types . . . let me know.
My employer and Rusty’s employer are the same, so I’ll just echo what he said!
Coverage elsewhere …
CNN (Not an “official” story, just a PR Newswire repost.)
AJC (Looks like you beat them by about 30 minutes.)
As a former team leader for Earthlink, I can say that this is hardly a surprise.
When I began working for Elink, just after the Elink/Mindspring merger, we had something like 4-5,000 employees. Apparently the 900 people being laid off this week are nearly half the workforce.
Laying off eighty percent of the workforce in six years strikes me as boding bad for business.
Did any of the companies traditionally known as dialup ISPs make the jump to a broadband-based service model quickly enough to stay ahead of the dialup crash?
The big problem with the industry shift to broadband was that there were already a number of other companies in control of that market, phone companies and cable providers. ISPs were basically resellers of existing services. There wasn’t really a way to compete effectively on the service, alone.
Honestly, we would have stayed with Earthlink forever - Thomas had had his service with them for like, nine years, but their customer service became impossible to deal with. We had what we knew to be a line problem, and it took an act of God to get them to even consider a line problem. I was really disappointed, but we were on the phone with some incooperative person once a month for a while and it was just more than I could deal with.