Last month, on April 10, staffers inside The Daily Dot noticed something strange happening in their traffic dashboard. It wasn’t the usual ebb and flow of internet readership—the kind of minor volatility that might accompany a slow news week. It was an outright collapse. A sudden drop-off of referral traffic that couldn’t be explained by the publication’s content mix. As the numbers cratered, The Daily Dot's engineers tried everything they could, deploying technical fixes that they hoped would remedy the crisis. But no fix reversed the trend. The traffic had simply vanished.

When the end of the month arrived, there was no more time left on the clock to find a solution. And so, last Wednesday, The Daily Dot—the internet culture website that has served as a talent incubator for numerous technology reporters—was forced to lay off 15 people, a number that represented a significant chunk of its already lean operation. "Unfortunately, this was beyond anything we've seen before," Nicholas White, chief executive of Fragment Media Group, parent company of The Daily Dot, told Status. "We have fixed every technical problem we can find and we still have top engagement rates in the platforms for the trickle of traffic we're getting, but there's been no improvement overall. The accompanying revenue decline, of course, was enormous so we had no choice but to lay off a large number of people."

"It was a shitty, heartbreaking day—some of the people we let go had been with us a very long time and we miss them very much," White added.