Anonymous Targets Zynga, For The ‘Outrageous Treatment’ Of Its Employees

New York – It seems that Anonymous, the self-styled sentry of the internet, has threatened to shut down Zynga and Facebook, days after the gaming giant announced it was laying off 5 per cent of its workforce. A posting on the AnonNews site this morning states that layoffs at Zynga will help to bring about the “end of the US game market as we know it” as jobs get shipped overseas, a plan that the AnonNews report says was discovered in confidential files leaked from the games maker.

Zynga, the embattled games company behind Facebook hit FarmVille, that is being viewed by many as merciless and something that only cares about its bottomline and does not take care of its employees, could have a number of its games leaked and made available for free if it does not scuttle an offshoring plan.

The notorious hacktivist group Anonymous apparently is perturbed by the financial situation at Zynga. It alleges that Zynga is planning massive layoffs and plans to send jobs overseas, saying it has documents that reveal Zynga’s strategy which includes firing about a thousand people by November 23, an unidentified member of the group, donning their trademark Guy Fawkes mask, announced in a YouTube video posted on Sunday.

Thrashing the tech firm for slashing its employee base while sitting on ‘billion dollars cash,’ the hackers threatened to release games it has stolen from Zynga’s server, in addition to shutting down both Zynga and Facebook on November 5.

“With a billion dollars cash sitting in a bank we do believe that such actions are an insult to the population and the behavior of corporations like Zynga must change,” a message posted on Anonnews reads.

However, beyond merely circulating the alleged plan, Anonymous says it stands ready to retaliate – it is threatening to ‘release also all the games we have taken down from their servers for free,’ if Zynga does not call off the offshoring effort. The group did not specify what games it has taken but set a deadline of November 5 – also known as Guy Fawkes Day, named for the English historical figure from which Anonymous derives inspiration.

Zynga this week confirmed that it is planning to lay off about 150 employees, or approximately 5 percent of its worldwide workforce, and there has been persistent rumors that it will make further cuts to its staff. It is also closing its Boston office and expects to shutter its U.K. and Japan studios as well. That word came just a day before the FarmVille maker reported that it lost $52.7 million in the third quarter. The company also said it has a cash stockpile of about $1.6 billion.

Of course, in these situation, we have no idea who actually is targeting Zynga or whether they can do what they say they can. Apart from financial troubles, Zynga has 5 of the 10 most popular games on Facebook, the massive social network that helped propel it into widespread popularity.