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“Over the last few weeks, literally until last night, we exhausted every option available and have endeavored to raise sufficient capital to reach profitability,” Finkelstein wrote. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to do so, which is why we haven’t shared the news with you until now. This is truly the last thing I wanted, and I am deeply sorry.”

Like pretty much every other company that has conducted layoffs in the last few years, Finkelstein cited vague “economic headwinds” in his note to staff about the closure (which, we cannot emphasize enough, came after  staff learned that they lost their jobs from a New York Times article). Still, Finkelstein has not addressed just how it’s possible to burn through so much money so quickly.

From the get-go, media experts were skeptical of The Messenger’s game plan, which was to leverage social media referral traffic to generate ad revenue. This strategy for a media business might have worked 15 years ago, but this isn’t the era of the BuzzFeed boom (just look at that company’s stock price). At launch, Nieman Lab noted that The Messenger was publishing a new story every two minutes, some of which were only one sentence long. Though Finkelstein’s ambitions to build a large-scale, unbiased media machine were lofty, they were ultimately doomed to fail. Sadly, that failure means financial uncertainty and precarious healthcare coverage for its workers.

“I cannot fathom doing this to anyone,” wrote former Messenger staffer Madeline Fitzgerald on X. “I don’t [know] why you would treat employees like this.”