The Snapdeal founders, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, have come out all guns blazing against reports that their company was going to fire 150 employees and wind down its Bangalore office. “Online marketplace Snapdeal is in the process of laying off at least 150 people in its R&D tech centre in Bengaluru, sources directly aware of the matter told TOI.”, the report claimed. While the report had quoted a Snapdeal spokesperson saying that no layoffs were taking place, both cofounders separately took to Twitter to attack the newspaper.
Journalism hits a new low with absolute fiction being peddled as news headline! https://t.co/GeMfd6Bnuj
— Rohit Bansal (@rohitkbansal) July 16, 2016
Rohit Bansal said that journalism had hit a new low and called the report absolute fiction. CEO Kunal Bahl called it “complete nonsense.”
Complete nonsense! "Skeptics" turning to fabricating facts for more tech gloom-doom masala 🙂 https://t.co/kDNgHlfa4u
— Kunal Bahl (@1kunalbahl) July 16, 2016
The report had stated that Snapdeal was on a cost cutting drive and would fire 150 people. It said that it might shut down the Bangalore office if it were unable to raise funds this year.
Similar reports about layoffs at Snapdeal’s Bangalore office had also emerged a few months ago and had been denied by the founders. Snapdeal, though, had fired over 600 customer support staff from its NCR office in February this year. At that point, the company had insisted that the layoffs had been on performance grounds, but the fired employees had disagreed, protesting for around a week at the office, and had raised slogans against both Bahl and Bansal.