"Seventeen of our teammates are impacted today." vs something like "We decided to fire 17 teammates due to this."

Even "teammates" is unnecessarily euphemistic. "We laid off 17 members of our staff" works just fine.

I didn't edit that part as it felt like "teammates" was admitting a greater feeling of guilt, or something.

> It's active voice, no?

Yes, it is — at least in the first sentence.

> How is it different than we fired, except that firing sounds more tied employee performance, no longer needed more seems like employer fault.

I think this is GP’s issue with the phrasing here. Passive or not, it sounds like it’s deflecting focus away from something — as they said, ‘It implies there was nothing that could be done, that this was just a force of nature’.

"they were impacted", the passive voice, has the actor eliminated. who impacted? yc. yc leadership made a decision which impacted 17 people. that's active voice.