This is a rather unfortunate bit of news, especially considering the current state of the economy. Seventy-three employees of Sega -- 36 in San Francisco and 37 in London -- were handed pink slips yesterday as part of an effort to "implement a reorganization of its businesses within the American and [European] markets".
In this thread on the official PSU forums, GM Edward quickly confirmed the news and announced that nobody on Sega of America's PSU team was laid off. For now, that's good news for the regional servers, though in my opinion this "reorganization" doesn't exactly paint a picture of a corporation in good financial straits.
Whether or not the PC/PS2 servers were a casualty of the restructuring effort will probably never be known. Nobody knows exactly how much Sega was spending on maintenance of those servers, and Sega will probably never tell. Hopefully the Xbox 360 player population doesn't begin free-falling, because in an economic environment where struggling companies will cut costs any way they can, those servers would probably be first on the chopping block.
The complete story, including a full copy of the e-mail sent to Sega employees, can be read over at Kotaku. Hopefully everyone affected by this layoff will be able to rebound and find work elsewhere.
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