Discord is letting go of 170 workers, or roughly 17% of its staff.
The messaging app informed employees about the layoffs in a memo and all-hands meeting that The Verge obtained. Jason Citron, the CEO, attributed the layoffs to the company’s rapid growth.
In the memo, Citron allegedly informed the workers, “We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020.”
“As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.
In August, the privately held company reduced its workforce by 4%. CNBC estimated that Discord, which Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy cofounded in 2015, will be worth $15 billion in 2021.
The news follows widespread layoffs that large tech companies made this week.
Semafor and 9to5Google were the first to report that Google was laying off hundreds of employees who work on the Google Assistant as well as team members from its devices and services division.
Amazon is also cutting several hundreds of workers across Prime Video and MGM Studios, a memo obtained by Business Insider showed. Additionally, a memo sent by Twitch’s CEO at 6:00 a.m. that BI also obtained states that 500 workers, or more than a third of the workforce, are being laid off at Amazon’s Twitch.
The e-commerce company eliminated 27,000 positions last year, including 18,000 in just January, as several significant tech firms adjusted their workforces after going on a hiring binge during the pandemic.
According to data from the job cuts tracker Layoffs.fyi, 35 companies have let go of 5,586 tech employees so far this year.
