Patreon lays off its entire security team

Patreon has confirmed it has laid off the entire security team. Techcrunch reported on this. Also on Twitter affected employees commented on the matter. The background for the layoffs was not commented by the management. However, an external organisation would “develop […] security capabilities and conduct regular security assessments”. A few days later, Patreon also cut 17% of its staff, and CEO Jack Conte explained the security cuts as part of a plan of “distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team”. He also assured that “we are in fact increasing our investment in security”, which is a bold way to describe five fewer security engineers.