Hiring freeze went live across 847 open engineering positions at 11:47pm last night
Every single req from L3 to Staff. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, security, data - everything dead
3,200 candidates in active pipelines got auto-rejection emails between 2am and 3am. No explanation. Just "we've decided to move forward with other candidates"
Internal hiring portal shows "maintenance mode" but sources tell me it's permanent
47 recruiters told to "pause all sourcing activities indefinitely" - that's corporate speak for start updating your resume
The kicker: they just posted record Q4 revenue, beat earnings by 12%, stock up 23% this month
But the CFO's internal memo leaked - "AI tooling has fundamentally altered our engineering productivity equation"
Translation: 2 senior engineers with Cursor are outshipping entire 8-person pods
One hiring manager watched 6 months of interview loops evaporate overnight. Had 23 final round candidates scheduled for next week
All cancelled via calendar invite. No phone calls. No explanation.
The new plan: 31 remaining senior engineers, 140 offshore contractors with Copilot access, and aggressive automation targets
Current team of 284 engineers getting restructured down to 85 by April
They're calling it "operational excellence through AI acceleration"
But the offshore contracts are already signed. $47/hour fully loaded vs $180k salaries
The hiring pause isn't temporary. It's the new normal.
If you're in their pipeline, you just watched your entire industry shift overnight
DMs are exploding. Everyone sees the writing on the wall now