Employees at the video-sharing site TikTok claim that the company is cutting off workers to save expenses, making it the latest digital company to go through a round of layoffs in recent weeks.
According to NPR, about 60 workers were let go, primarily from the business’s sales and advertising section. 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 applications in the United States is TikTok, which employs over 7,000 people there. Its parent company, the sizable IT conglomerate ByteDance, has more than 150,000 employees worldwide.
Despite TikTok’s tremendous success, its links to ByteDance have put the site 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 IT sector is the TikTok layoffs.
While the industry as a whole concentrates its resources on the race to develop new generative AI tools, which many see as the next big tech boom, other sizable digital companies like Google and Amazon have cut thousands of jobs this year.
According to the employment monitoring 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 experts 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.
