Spring Street Networks, the online personal operator for all those lovely singles you see on Nerve, The Onion, and right here at yours truly, is allegedly going through a restructuring phase. And by "restructuring," we mean slashing and burning. An anonymous insider reports:

On Monday Spring Street Personals (the operator of nerve personals and YES! gawker personals) let go 60% of its employees. Now it's operating with just 8 people. Most of the technology and customer service team has been let go. Only 2 people remain in each department.

Remaining report and spanking-new update after the jump.

The deep job cuts means that there will be very little customer service available and virtually no technical support for partners. (One programmer is left to support over 80 partner sites.)

SSN is running very short on cash. It has not paid rent in over 2 months and stopped making payments to most of the partners. The rumor is that some partners such as The Onion hasn't been paid in 12 months.

The cash flow issue has been so troublesome to the employees that once a paycheck is passed out, all employees run to the bank fearing the funds might run out before it is cashed.

The cuts are meant to keep the company cash positive until it's sold. None of the potential buyers are told of the job cuts and employees are advised not to reveal it.

Two of the possible buyers are LavaLife and 180 Solutions (a spyware company who intend on using SSN as a distribution point).

180 Solutions offered 2 million.

If spring street networks goes out of business, Nerve.com will lose most of it's revenue stream and most likely be in trouble as well.

UPDATE: On the other hand, yet ANOTHER anonymous insider writes, "It's not true that the buyers don't know about the company restructuring. It's not true that the onion hasn't been paid in 12 months (much less any other partner). It's not true that personals makes up most of Nerve's revenue (it's less than 25%, and nerve is economically solid without personals, though there is no scenario in which nerve personals goes away)." And we hear that the staff reduction isn't as bad as what insider #1 says — we're thinking of having our two insiders fight this one out in a mudwrestling match.