Employees at the video-sharing site TikTok claim that the firm is reducing personnel in an attempt to save expenses, making it the latest digital company to go through a round of layoffs in recent weeks.
A representative for the company said that some 60 workers were let go, the most of them were in the sales and advertising department. They described the changes as a standard reorganization. Employees in Austin, New York, Los Angeles, and overseas are among those whose responsibilities were cut.
In response to the layoff announcement, the corporation has planned a town hall meeting for this Tuesday.
One of the most downloaded apps in the United States is TikTok, which employs over 7,000 people there. More than 150,000 people are employed worldwide by its parent firm, the massive tech conglomerate ByteDance, which is headquartered in China.
Despite TikTok’s tremendous success, its ties to ByteDance have put the service in the eyes of Washington officials due to concerns about national security for years.
According to the firm, there are over 150 million active users in the United States. Furthermore, ByteDance is thought to be the world’s most valuable private corporation, valued at $225 billion.
The most recent indication of suffering in the tech sector is the TikTok layoffs.
Thousands of jobs have been cut by other large digital companies this year, such as Google and Amazon, while the industry as a whole concentrate its resources on the race to create new generative AI tools, which many see as the next big tech boom.
According to the employment tracker site layoffs.fyi, there have been over 10,000 tech job losses so far in 2024. It comes after 2023, a devastating year for the tech sector that saw the loss of about 260,000 jobs—the worst decline in tech employment since the pandemic-related mass layoffs. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, dubbed 2023 “the Year of Efficiency,” and the wave of cost-cutting is still happening. However, compared to last year, the majority of Silicon Valley analysts anticipate far smaller and more focused layoffs.
Observers of the IT sector have pointed to a variety of factors as the cause of the job losses, including the industry’s reorganization of workforces to concentrate on artificial intelligence, residual staff bloat from the epidemic, and businesses looking to increase earnings for shareholders.
Twitch, a company owned by Amazon, fired 500 people, or one-third of its workforce, earlier this month. In a blog post, CEO Dan Clancy stated that the company’s “conservative” growth projections required drastic workforce reductions.