Following through on a warning earlier this month, Authentic Brands Group has revoked Sports Illustrated’s license to publish due to a missed payment.

As a result of the move, the entire staff of the 70-year-old print and online publication was notified on Friday that their jobs were being eliminated.

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“We appreciate the work and efforts of everyone who has contributed to the SI brand and business,” SI operator The Arena Group wrote in a memo to employees that set off outrage on social media.

In a statement, Sports Illustrated Union and The NewsGuild of New York vowed to “fight for every one of our colleagues.”

The Arena Group, which has operated the venerable brand under a license agreement since 2019, said in an SEC filing earlier this month that it did not make a quarterly payment of about $3.75 million.

Authentic “issued the company a notice of breach with the intent to exercise its right of termination,” Arena said in the filing, adding that they are “in discussion” with the licensor.

Authentic Brands did not immediately respond to Deadline’s request for comment.

The internal memo from Arena said some workers would be terminated immediately, while others will continue working during the notice period legally required of employers. All affected employees will get severance pay, the memo said.

It has been a bumpy ride for Sports Illustrated in the years since it left Time Inc., its comfortable home for decades. Time Warner sold Time Inc. to Meredith, with tentpole brands Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune then leaving the portfolio under separate divestitures orchestrated by Meredith.

SI‘s fabled roster of contributors, from sportswriting immortals like Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins to the literary likes of William Faulkner, kept the magazine on the top shelf of media in the latter part of the 20th century. Its photography was the stuff of museum exhibits, dramatically expanding the sports fan’s previous media diet of box scores and wire-service-style game stories. Transitioning to the digital age, however, has been challenging. As with all print-dominated businesses, the magazine was beset by online upstarts like Deadspin, Bleacher Report and many others, not to mention social media, and found itself playing catch-up.

Ross Levinsohn, the veteran media exec who was CEO of The Arena Group, was ousted in December in the wake of an embarrassing revelation that SI had relied on AI-generated contributors who were not, in fact, actual human writers.

MORE to come …

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