TikTok is the latest tech company to mount another round of layoffs in an increasingly bleak January.
According to NPR, which broke the news, TikTok cut about 60 jobs, mostly in sales and advertising.
Since then, TikTok users have complained that their For You Page is overrun with videos from creators seeking to make affiliate commissions by promoting products from TikTok Shop.
Across social platforms and other consumer tech products, layoffs have been rampant so far this year.
Google has laid off hundreds of employees in hardware and advertising sales, plus another hundred employees at YouTube.
As Amazon initiates job cuts across its entire business, including its streaming division, the e-commerce giant is now laying off employees within its Buy with Prime segment.
Launched in 2022, Buy with Prime is a service that enables third-party merchants to offer Prime benefits like free shipping and returns.
Buy with Prime expanded its availability in early 2023, adding more U.S. brands like BigCommerce and Sustainable Glam.
“Buy with Prime is a top priority for Amazon, with strong adoption from merchants and positive feedback from customers, and we will continue investing significant resources in Buy with Prime to build on that momentum.
Earlier this month, Amazon laid off 500 Twitch workers and hundreds of employees at Prime Video and MGM Studios.
After laying off over 1,000 workers across divisions last week and cutting 100 jobs at YouTube, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to its staff warning more layoffs are expected this year.
Pichai’s memo said the company will have to make “tough choices” to meet its ambitious goals, as reported by The Verge.
But I know it’s very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted,” he said in an email to staffers.
At the time, the company also confirmed to TechCrunch that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman were leaving the organisation.
On Wednesday, Google laid off 100 YouTube staffers as part of reorganisation.
Yet another series of layoffs has hit Google, this time at its video-sharing platform, YouTube.
The company will eliminate 100 employees, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
Last week, Google laid off more than 1,000 workers across several divisions, including engineering, services and voice-activated product Google Assistant.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson said in a provided statement.
“We’re continuing to support any impacted employees as they look for new roles here at Google and beyond,” the spokesperson added.
Disney-owned animation studio Pixar is poised to undergo layoffs this year, TechCrunch has learned and the company confirmed.
The studio stressed the layoffs are not imminent, but will take place later this year as Pixar focuses on making less content.
According to insiders, the Pixar layoffs include headcount that was hired for Disney+ — hires Disney pushed on Pixar to produce for its streaming division, which hasn’t yet turned a profit.
In Q4, Disney+ added 7 million new subscribers, bringing its total to 150.2 million, including Hotstar, beating analysts’ expectations of 148.15 million subscribers.
A Disney subsidiary, Pixar is best known for films like “Finding Nemo,” “Monsters, Inc.” “WALL-E,” the “Toy Story” franchise, and others.
The affected divisions include voice-activated Google Assistant as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring; and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
Separately, the company has also let go of people working on the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.
Last year, Google had rolling layoffs in different teams including the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September, and its news division in October.
Just a few weeks after its most recent round of layoffs, Unity is once again reducing its workforce.
Unity is the maker of a video game engine that is widely used in the video game industry.
Under the old pricing scheme, indie developers who earn less than $100,000 per year would be able to use Unity for free.
Bigger video game studios would have to pay $1,900 per user per year.
And yet, that controversy had some wide-ranging consequences as many developers lost faith in the game engine company.
The cybersecurity sector was once largely untouched by the vast headcount reductions taking place across the wider industry, but 2023 shows no sector is immune.
But it’s clear that cybersecurity firms are no longer exempt from layoffs, despite a strong workforce and an ever-increasing number of cyberattacks and breaches.
According to data from layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi, more than 110 cybersecurity companies have made cuts since the beginning of 2023.
The layoffs came almost exactly a year after Malwarebytes eliminated 14% of its global workforce.
While many cybersecurity firms blamed economic headwinds for reductions in headcount, Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski told TechCrunch that the layoffs were an exercise in rationalizing expenditures.
Once again, Etsy’s layoffs come as no surprise Junkification and fierce competition paint a tough path aheadRemember when we wrote that Spotify’s latest layoffs make sense?
Well, we feel the same about Etsy’s announcement that it would lay off 11% of its workforce.
This is not us being callous with employees affected by these layoffs, or making excuses for what led the NASDAQ-listed marketplace to that point and what could perhaps have been prevented.
We are just saying that this isn’t much of a surprise.
But more than quantitative, Etsy’s challenge is qualitative.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have written to the United States’ Acting Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, expressing concerns over the disproportionate impact tech layoffs could have on Black workers, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch.
More than 240,000 jobs have been eliminated this year due to layoffs in the tech industry.
The worry here is that the “last in, first out” approach to tech layoffs commonly employed at companies may impact new, less senior and “non-essential” employees, who are most likely to be minorities.
“We’ve seen that Black, Brown, and women tech workers have borne the brunt of layoffs while companies have enjoyed billion-dollar profits,” Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, co-chair of the CBC, told TechCrunch.
The Department of Labor and Su did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
