Discord latest tech company to go for mass layoffs, confirms firing 17 per cent of workforce

Popular social messaging platform Discord has announced its biggest layoff, removing 17 percent of its workforce as part of strategic planning. The company’s announcement of layoffs follows the recent announcements of job cuts by big tech giants including Google, Amazon, Meta, and others.

Discord CEO Jason Citron, in an all-hands meeting, informed his staffers about the latest job cuts and shared an internal memo citing that the decision of layoffs is to ‘sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organisation.’ The official memo, as seen by The Verge, further reveals that the layoffs will impact 170 people across various departments of the company.

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The recent job cuts add to the last layoffs the messaging app announced in August 2023, which removed 4 percent of the employees. However, the latest layoffs are the biggest that Discord has announced. Reportedly, the reason behind the job cuts is not just to save costs but also potentially due to over hiring. In his memo to staff, Citron revealed that the company’s headcount has increased significantly in the last few years. ‘We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,’ he wrote. ‘As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.

Notably, many other tech companies, including Silicon Valley’s leaders like Amazon and Meta, followed the trend of overhiring after the pandemic. However, almost all these companies last year announced mass layoffs, terminating thousands of employees across various departments around the globe.

The latest layoffs from Discord also follow the recent trend of layoffs by Google that continue to sweep across the tech industry, including deep cuts at Google and Amazon just this week. Google announced layoffs of around a few hundred employees across the hardware division, the digital assistant, and the engineering teams. According to Google, the job cuts will impact staff, including those working on the voice-based Google Assistant and on the augmented reality hardware team.

Similarly, Amazon has recently revealed plans to reduce its workforce in the Prime Video and MGM Studios division, affecting ‘several hundred’ employees engaged in streaming and studio operations. This decision comes in the wake of similar workforce adjustments by Amazon’s subsidiary, Twitch, which disclosed intentions to cut around 35 percent of its employees.

Furthermore, Meta, on the following day, also declared its intent to streamline its workforce. In a move impacting Instagram, Meta has terminated 60 employees, with a particular focus on those in Technical Program Manager (TPM) roles across the organisation. The affected individuals have been presented with the option to either re-apply for their positions or face termination in March.

All these layoffs are said to be part of cost-cutting and restructuring efforts. While the number of impacted employees is comparatively low compared to last year’s mass layoffs, these newly announced layoffs appear to be an alarming indicator of an emerging trend reminiscent of what we witnessed last year.