Vice is laying off hundreds of staff and will no longer publish at Vice.com. The outcome of the company's spectacular rise (it was valued at more than $5bn in 2017) and fall was revealed in a note to staff, posted below in full.
There is some alarm over the apparent prospect of the website being completely shut down, with people wondering why it can't be left online as-is. The reason is that most modern websites are generally dynamically-generated and, like running engines, require maintenance and monitoring even when idle. And something like Vice will be a horror of randomly-glued together parts, all requiring their own servers and licenses and security updates and God knows what else. Converting a site and its archives to static HTML or some simple database presenter is the solution, but … the people in charge of fucking Vice's corpse won't likely be doing that, even if they understand what it means.
