Hiring freeze rumors vs reality

I’ve seen a few posts on here about a silent hiring freeze. I looked at the internal career portal today and noticed a bunch of roles that were open last week have suddenly vanished or are marked 'on hold.' Management is still giving us the standard 'business as usual' talk, but the numbers don't seem to be adding up in the departmental budget reviews. Every time I ask my director about backfilling the vacant spot in our team, I get a vague answer about 'prioritizing strategic initiatives' instead of a straight yes or no. It feels like they’re trying to manage the headcount downward through attrition before they have to do anything official. It’s incredibly draining trying to cover two people’s workloads while leadership pretends everything is fine. Anyone else seeing positions disappear overnight? I'm worried that we're essentially doing the work of two people now so they can justify axing the second role entirely in the next fiscal quarter.