Monday, at 10am, there was a carefully worded email sent to all staff at work.
The email requested that everyone attend an important staff meeting at 2:30pm. No clue as to the subject was given but we were told that the meeting was important. The give away for me was the line which said that a written statement would be made available immediately to everyone unable to attend.
There are very few announcements that management make where there is an imperative need for everyone to receive the same message simultaneously. Notification of redundancies is one such area and I believe that it is a legal necessity for this to happen. I wasn't much surprised then when we were told that, though the business as a whole was sound, there was not enough work to sustain the number of programmers and designers on the staff.
Consequently, we are shedding about 12-15 people - about a third of those two teams. It is hard but it has been inevitable. Many of us expected it last summer. Now we shall have the usual few months of worry and discontent.