Stripe Sent Its Laid-Off Employees a Picture of a Duck in Termination Email

Stripe laid off 300 people on Monday, impacting mostly the product, engineering, and operations divisions. However, some of the company’s employees were confused. Along with their termination email, they were sent a photo of a duck. But that wasn’t the only mistake the company made.

According to Business Insider, the business software company emailed some employees a photo of a duck and details of their dismissal to notify them that they had been laid off. The outlet reported, “The image, which was attached as a PDF, showed a yellow duck with brown feathers on its wing and accompanying text that says, ‘US-Non-California Duck.’”

Unfortunately, that was gaffe number one. Number two was that Stripe sent these terminated employees an incorrect termination date.

Business Insider reported that the sending of the duck image was confirmed by a company spokesperson. They additionally confirmed that the incorrect termination date was also in error and shared a follow-up email from Rob McIntosh, Stripe’s chief people officer. It read, “I also want to note that some impacted Stripes received a notification error to their personal email accounts Monday evening PT.”

McIntosh added, “I apologize for the error and any confusion it caused. Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes.”

What Stripe Jobs Were Affected by the Layoffs?

Stripe accidentally sent an image of a duck when notifying some employees they were getting laid off https://t.co/9CApydDNRT

— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) January 21, 2025

Layoffs were primarily in product and operations roles, with some in engineering affected as well.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Stripe has been affected by layoffs. The company reduced its workforce by 14% in 2022. The company’s CEO Patrick Collison shared the news in a staff memo at the time.

Collison wrote, “Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date. We’re reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process. If you are among those impacted, you will receive a notification email within the next 15 minutes. For those of you leaving: we’re very sorry to be taking this step and John [Collison] and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it.”

He added that there was “no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to do our best to treat everyone leaving as respectfully as possible and to do whatever we can to help.” Employees subsequently received benefits such as 14 weeks of severance pay, the annual bonus for 2022, all their paid PTO, six months of healthcare continuation, and career support, to name a few.

It is unclear if Stripe will share a similar type of severance package for its latest batch of laid-off employees.