The Scoop is a bonus series covering insights, patterns, and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message! I treat all such messages as anonymous.

The Scoop sometimes delivers firsthand, original reporting. I’m adding an ‘Exclusive’ label to news that features original reporting direct from my sources, as distinct from analysis, opinion, and reaction to events. Of course, I also analyze what’s happening in the tech industry, citing other media sources and quoting them as I dive into trends I observe. These sections do not carry the ‘Exclusive’ mark.

A request: in next week’s issue, I’m hoping to cover a roundup of compensation increases for 2023. If you are a hiring manager, please consider sharing what increases you’re planning. You don’t need to share the name of your company. Thanks for your help!

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We have more topics to cover today than usually:

CircleCI’s unnoticed holiday security breach. CircleCI customers returned from the holiday break to be told to urgently rotate their secrets, which were probably leaked. Exclusive.
Twitter’s first major outage since Musk’s takeover. What caused Twitter’s partial outage lasting hours on 28 December? I’ve talked with people involved in the incident to find out if it may have been connected to Elon Musk personally disconnecting server racks on Christmas eve. Exclusive.
Amazon to lay off 18,000 people and rescinding more offers. Things are looking grim at Amazon, with the online retailer announcing that layoffs will be larger than was communicated in December. Meanwhile, signed offers keep being rescinded. Could this be a signal of more cost cutting to come across Big Tech? Analysis.
Hiring freezes. Databricks, Asana and Spotify are slowing or freezing hiring: details. Exclusive.
Layoffs picking up with the new year. The first tech layoffs of the year are already in with Salesforce, Vimeo and Socure. Can we expect these to continue, or is the worst behind us already? My opinion. Exclusive details on Socure and analysis.
Microsoft starting to exit China? The tech giant is spinning up a new office in Vietnam to move teams from China over there. But why would the company begin to leave China? And would other US companies be wise to follow in Microsoft’s footsteps? Exclusive.
SpaceX valued at $142B? The company is raising $750M of fresh funding and I have more details on revenue numbers, projections, the likely date of an IPO and why Starlink looks like a really big deal. Exclusive.

1. CircleCI’s holiday security breach, unnoticed for weeks

The Pragmatic Engineer

The Scoop #35: Holiday security breaches and…

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