Following up on my tech slowdown post from last week, Twitter is indeed laying off over 300 people, or 8% of their staff:

“Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a letter Tuesday morning. “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.”

MakerBot is laying off 20% of their staff:

MakerBot is laying off 20 percent of its staff for the second time in the last six months, citing “market dynamics” and a failure to meet “ambitious goals.” The company is also leaving one of the two buildings it occupies in Industry City, a large-scale manufacturing complex in Brooklyn.

Layoffs like this remind me of traffic bottlenecks on the highway when there are no accidents: they’re the result of us stupid humans getting too greedy and not pacing ourselves.

I have side with HAL on this.

The problems can only be attributable to human error.