Some TikTok employees have already lost their jobs, while others are told to prepare for a meeting with the HR department as part of the video platform’s global restructuring efforts, Wired reports. According to the publication, European employees were warned that their jobs were at risk and to expect an HR meeting in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, employees in the UK were told to expect colleagues across departments to lose their jobs. In the US, some personnel were told that they were being let go shortly after they came in for work on Monday morning.
One of those US employees was David Ortiz, who was among the first executives TikTok parent company ByteDance hired outside of China. In a LinkedIn post, Ortiz said that his “role is being eliminated in a much larger re-organization effort.” A TikTok spokesperson did not deny that layoffs were taking place when Wired asked. However, they also didn’t confirm that the company is going through a global restructuring and didn’t provide the publication with a detailed statement on why TikTok is cutting jobs.
A staffer who talked to the publication said the company is only cutting employees and teams that managers believe haven’t been contributing enough. They claimed that only 100 employees are being laid off, which is but a small percentage of around 10,000 employees across the US and Europe. That said, TikTok is merely one of the companies in the big tech, gaming, AV/EV and social media sphere that’s downsizing its workforce.
Some of the companies in the industry that had to let people go due to the economic downturn include Netflix, Unity and Twitter. Tesla reportedly laid off 200 Autopilot employees and closed an office in California. Bloomberg said Rivian plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce. Finally, Meta told employees to identify low performers, The Information said, and move them to exit the company if they’re unable to get back on track.