Zynga Quietly Lays Off Over 100 Employees

In a very quiet, borderline sneaky fashion, Facebook-game factory Zynga has shut down their Boston office in its entirety, as well as resorting to dishing out massive layoffs in their Austin and Chicago offices this afternoon, according to a vast number of industry reports on Twitter.

Gamasutra has been confirming these individual layoff reports all afternoon. And since everyone was all up on Twitter checking up on Apple news (and #Zynga started trending), everyone and their mother found out about it.

It’s almost as if Zynga was trying to bury the news under a bevy of iPad Mini, iPad 4 and iMac announcements, as Apple’s borderline cult-gathering press conferences tend to result in. Then again, I really don’t want this to be about Apple — it’s either coincidental or a brilliant business strategy. If you’re going to fire a bunch of people, you’re probably best off doing it on a day when a bunch of announcements are taking place, to make sure publications don’t gravitate to your stomach-turning news.

If that was the plan, that sure worked out great.

We’ve reached out to both affected employees of the layoffs as well as Zynga themselves to see if we can learn more about the reasoning for the firings. Thankfully, tons of gracious developers and PR folk around the industry have been reaching out and offering up applicable positions for ex-employees to apply for.

Between this, their recent not-as-awesome-as-they-might-have-hoped IPO, the resignation of their COO and their lawsuit with Electronic Arts, things aren’t boding well for ol’ Zynga.

[via Gamasutra]