Social media giant, TikTok, has laid off around 60 of its workers and a latest round of restructuring within the business, as reported by NPR.
The cuts have mostly come from its sales and advertising department across the US, with employees in Los Angeles, New York and Austin affected, as well as other roles abroad.
The video-sharing platform boasts 150 million active users and employs around 7,000 employees in the US alone. Meanwhile, its parent company, ByteDance, employs more than 150,000 people globally.
TikTok‘s last round of layoffs came in 2022 as part of global restructuring efforts and then again in 2023 when Dublin-based recruitment staff were axed.
ByteDance also made hundreds of cuts at Marvel Snap developer Nuverse last year. It’s estimated that the Chinese giant is the most valuable private company in the world at $225 billion.
More pain for the tech industry?
TikTok’s announcement is the latest of a long list of tech industry lay-offs over the last couple of years. Job tracker website, layoffs.fyi, estimates that almost 11,000 tech jobs have been shed by 63 different tech companies in the first month of 2024, while 2023 saw the industry slash over 260,000 roles, which was the largest number of cuts since the global pandemic of 2020 led to widespread layoffs.
Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, called 2023 “the Year of Efficiency” in light of the sector’s widespread cuts last year. Meta alone cut 10,000 jobs in 2023 to bring the workforce to the level it was in mid-2021.
Meanwhile, the likes of Google and Amazon have also announced plans to slash thousands of jobs this year as the industry collectively pivots towards developing AI tools.
According to NPR, Silicon Valley analysts are forecasting a much kinder year when it comes to company restructured and downsizing, although the level of cuts the sector has suffered in the first month of this year will not have done much to allay fears of another brutal year for tech workers.
Featured Image: Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
