Chronicle, Alphabet’s security startup that sister company Google Cloud gobbled up earlier this year “is dead,” according to a Motherboard report. “Stephen [Gillett] and Google killed it."

Gillet, Chronicle’s CEO, along with the company’s chief security officer have jumped ship and its chief technology officer will leave later this month, it says. The report, citing unnamed current and former employees, says other Chronicle workers are quitting because they believe Chronicle lost its original vision and they feel betrayed by Gillett and the rest of Chronicle management.

“People keep quitting. Sales doesn’t know what to do since there’s no real product roadmap anymore,” a current employee told Motherboard. “Engineering is depressed for the same reason, folks have been finding jobs at startups or transferring to other parts of Google.”

Co-founder and Chief Security Officer Mike Wiacek announced his departure from the entire Alphabet organization in a blog post earlier this month. He didn’t give any reasons as to why, after 13 years, he was leaving.

Google did not comment specifically on the claims in the Motherboard report. “Building a security business with world-class technology and helping our customers protect their data is our top priority,” Sunil Potti, vice president of Google Cloud Security, said in an email to SDxCentral. “Chronicle is critical to that mission, and we are investing aggressively in the Chronicle business to deliver a compelling product roadmap for customers.” 

Chronicle was born out of Alphabet’s secretive X research lab before being rolled out as an independent cybersecurity business in January 2018. It didn’t, however, launch its much-anticipated “Google-level” security product until a little over a year later.

At an event at Google’s San Francisco office this March Chronicle announced Backstory, a next-generation security information and event management (SIEM) tool built on Google infrastructure.

“Today as we launch Backstory, the important thing to realize is we’re in this for the long haul,” Gillett, said at the event. “Backstory is the first of what will be many offerings and capabilities over time.”

Chronicle execs at the event insisted the startup was completely independent from Google. And then three months later Chronicle merged with Google Cloud.