JOB CUTS ON THE WAY AS COVID-19 PANDEMIC STOPS COMPANIES ABILITY TO MAKE MONEY

Many companies worldwide are cutting jobs as the coronavirus pandemic undermines their ability to make money but one tech company made the situation worse.

One company made matters worse for staff, they were not told face to face but through an app.

Electric scooter-maker Bird axed about 400 posts on Friday, about 30% of its staff. And the Californian company used a Zoom conference call to tell them.

Zoom can connect up to 1,000 users on a single call - but many of the workers were unable to log on and found out via messages from colleagues posted online.

Details of Bird's lay-offs first emerged via a second-hand report on Twitter, which suggested a pre-recorded message had been played.

But the company's chief technology officer quickly clarified the situation.

Skip Twitter post by @ninjudd

Hey Julia. I just wanted to reach out because I was on the Zoom call, and it was definitely not pre-recorded. The woman delivering the message, a good friend, almost started crying halfway through. I acknowledge we could have done it better. It was a very hard day for everyone.

— Justin Balthrop (@ninjudd) March 28, 2020

End of Twitter post by @ninjudd

Its chief executive, Travis VanderZanden, later added: "Video was turned off, which we thought was more humane.

"In retrospect, we should've made one-on-one calls to the hundreds impacted, over the course of a few days."

Rival US scooter start-up Lime is also preparing to cut dozens of jobs, according to reports, after it announced plans to wind down and pause its service in most of the places it was active.