July 13, 2026

The FBI Seized Its Domains, and a Proxy Company Cut 40% of Its Staff

Alarum's FBI-driven collapse is the rare tech layoff with no AI excuse, Bethesda's Montreal team got locked out of their own systems for two months, and Tata is betting 8,900 AI engineers that outsourcing survives the model.

July 2026 so far (through July 13), newly announced cuts with disclosed numbers: roughly 10,100 people across 14 companies. Microsoft (4,800, July 6), Allianz Partners (up to 1,800, July 8, insurance not tech), Meituan (fewer than 2,000, July 10), OpenText (~400, July 8), Talrop (300+, July 12), Mews (~200, July 7), GoKwik (~120, July 11), Starling Bank (~130, July 8), Bragg Gaming (~95, July 9), Charter/Spectrum (107, July 8 WARN), Darrow (60, July 7), Ubisoft Barcelona (51, July 9), Alarum (~40, July 12), Yield Guild Games (35, July 6). Two May announcements hit their WARN effective date today, noted in Briefs.

Alarum: the layoff with no AI excuse

Alarum, an Israeli company dual-listed in Tel Aviv and on Nasdaq, summoned about 30 employees to pre-dismissal hearings on Sunday and placed another 10 on unpaid leave, according to Calcalist's CTech. With roughly 100 employees, contractors, and consultants at the end of 2025, that is close to 40% of the workforce touched in a single weekend.

The mechanism is not AI. It is an FBI investigation. U.S. authorities are probing Alarum's subsidiary NetNut over allegations that it connected users' home computers to its residential proxy network without their consent, and have seized domains. Security sources alleged a link between NetNut and software called "Popa," used to compromise devices. Alarum denies the allegations and says it is cooperating with law enforcement. The company has suspended data traffic across the affected services while it reviews its infrastructure, and warned that the suspension will materially hit its finances and "reduce the need for its existing workforce."

The financial damage is stark. Alarum's market capitalization has fallen to around NIS 50 million, down from roughly NIS 1 billion at its 2024 peak, with shares plunging on both the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The cuts reverse a 2025 hiring spree in which Alarum nearly doubled its headcount. The irony worth noting: Alarum's paying customers use its proxy network to, among other things, train AI models. A company sitting in the AI-data supply chain is shrinking not because AI replaced its workers but because law enforcement pulled the plug on its core service. After a week of companies dressing layoffs up as AI "upgrades," this one at least has an honest cause.

Bethesda Montreal, locked out for two months

The Xbox reset reached Bethesda Game Studios' Montreal office with a detail that crystallizes how clinical the process has become. At 10:30 a.m. last Monday, about a dozen employees on a 120-person team were told by video conference, delivered by a director dialing in from Maryland, that they would be laid off in two months and locked out of company systems until then, a worker present told The Canadian Press. Roughly 10% of the Montreal team. The group had been riding the ongoing success of Fallout 76, with The Elder Scrolls VI in development.

This is a subset of the 3,200 Xbox cuts already tracked, not a new total. What is new is the texture: a two-month limbo with system access revoked, delivered remotely from another country. The Montreal dozen sit inside a broader Quebec reckoning the same piece documents. Quebec is home to more than 300 studios and 45% of Canada's roughly 34,000 game developers, generating over $1.4 billion a year in economic output. Epic cut more than 1,000 workers (20%) earlier this year, some in Montreal. Ubisoft shed nearly 140 across Halifax and Winnipeg. Eidos (124 in March), Electronic Arts, and Behaviour Interactive have all cut in Montreal in the last four months. The province's 37.5% salary tax credit was cut by a third two years ago, and the global share of people who play video games has shrunk since 2021 as TikTok, sports betting, crypto, and consumer AI apps competed for the same attention. Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin called it "a perfect storm."

The Xbox union's "Save Our Devs" march is still set for Tuesday, July 15, across Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal, the first organized labor action against the reset.

Xero gives underperformers 30 days

Accounting-software company Xero told employees rated "Below Expectation" to either take voluntary severance or enter a 30-day performance-improvement plan, Forbes Australia reported on July 12. CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy framed the tighten-up around AI: "As AI changes how work gets done, we have the chance to redefine how small business finance works." The number affected is undisclosed. The ASX-listed company finished March with 5,114 full-time-equivalent staff, but 578 came from its Melio acquisition; excluding Melio, headcount actually fell by 74 to 4,536. Share-based payment expense jumped 58% to NZ$240.1 million, now 43.3% of free cash flow. This is a manage-out dressed in AI language, the kind of quiet, performance-bar reduction that will not show up in layoff trackers but shrinks a workforce all the same.

Briefs: Charter, and the WARN clock

Charter Communications, operating as Spectrum, filed a WARN notice on July 8 to discontinue its network operations center in Town and Country, Missouri. 107 employees, primarily network engineers and upper management, are affected effective September 8. The company is outsourcing back-office roles to support remote network monitoring and offering affected staff comparable roles in the St. Louis area for at least eight months. No customer-facing roles are hit. The telecom follows earlier rounds, including a March Appleton, Wisconsin call-center closure of about 313 jobs and a prior reduction of roughly 1,200 roles. The stated push is consolidating operations and automating back-office work.

Two previously announced California cuts hit their WARN effective date today, July 13, both from May memos rather than new decisions: LinkedIn 606 (Mountain View 352, San Francisco 108, Sunnyvale 59, Carpinteria 21, 66 remote, engineering hit hardest) and Cisco 471 (San Jose 236, Milpitas 154, San Francisco 81, software engineers hit hardest), part of the May-announced roughly 4,000. Separating the effective date from the announcement date matters here: these workers were told weeks ago, not today.

Hiring counter-signal: Tata's 8,900 bet

Tata Consultancy Services is building a team of up to 8,900 forward-deployed AI engineers and hunting for AI acquisitions, Reuters reported on July 12, a deliberate counter to the fear that AI will gut India's $315 billion IT-services industry. CEO K Krithivasan put the figure at 1% to 1.5% of TCS's associates and dismissed the disruption thesis: companies still need partners to integrate and deploy AI systems, and "this has nothing to do with cost arbitrage." TCS spends about $1 billion a year on talent development. The plan puts India's largest outsourcer in direct competition with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, all of which have expanded forward-deployed-engineering hiring this year.

The labor market is splitting exactly along that line. iCIMS June data shows computer-programmer openings up 35% year-over-year, software-developer openings up 28%, and database-administrator openings up 27%, even as application volume for AI-adjacent tech roles fell 11%. Healthcare tech hiring is up 8% and manufacturing 4%. The companies absorbing displaced tech talent in 2026 are less often a second AI team at a hyperscaler and more often a first-generation AI capability at a regional health system or manufacturer. And there is a boomerang effect: Robert Half has reported that 29% of companies that laid off workers specifically because of AI have already rehired for those same roles, and Forrester that 55% of executives who replaced employees with AI expect to regret the decision within eighteen months. The pattern researchers keep finding is mechanical, a company automates a role, six to twelve months pass, and the AI turns out to handle about 60% of what the job actually required. The remaining 40% goes unhandled until someone is quietly rehired into the position a press release once eliminated.