Queen Nwabueze
As TikTok faces new political pressure in the US, the app has begun laying off staff as part of a company-wide restructuring.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelThe report did not say how many TikTok staff had been let go, or the total number of jobs that were at risk as part of the restructuring. But one TikTok staffer, who was not identified by name said that the number of layoffs would be less than 100.
According to David Ortiz, a US-based TikTok staffer who listed his title as “monetization product leader” on LinkedIn, wrote in a post on Monday that his job was “being eliminated in a much larger re-organization effort.”
It will be recalled that before these cuts, execs at the company had projected strength despite a broader downturn in the tech and advertising sectors.
The company’s head of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, had said that the platform had neither seen an ad market slowdown nor some of the headwinds that other companies were facing.
“I’ve heard there’s going to be a slowdown in the ad market, anywhere from 2% to 6%, but we have not seen it,” Chandlee said. “We’re not seeing the headwinds that some others are seeing.”
A similar report by The Wall Street Journal previously reported, layoffs have spread through the Chinese tech sector in recent weeks including at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.
Other creator economy and ads-focused companies have also laid off employees or slowed down hiring recently. Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, put a hiring freeze in place in May as it sought to reprioritize its business. And Snapchat-maker Snap Inc. issued a profit warning the same month that dragged down advertising and social-media stocks at the time.
Emphatically, the layoffs came as TikTok faces a new wave of political attacks in the US. Officials in Congress and the FCC had questioned in recent weeks, whether the company is effectively guarding US user data from the Chinese government. A BuzzFeed News report from June revealed that engineers from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance had repeatedly accessed US user data from within China.
