TikTok began laying off employees last week across its operations and marketing teams.
For some impacted staffers who had been encouraged to continue working business as usual amid Washington's political attacks, the sudden dismissals felt like a shock to the system.
"I'm just really disappointed," one laid-off TikTok employee told Business Insider. "I was just getting into a groove with my team on a project I was really excited about. They blindsided us."
The ex-staffer, along with the other former employees in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not given permission to speak about their employer. Their identities are known to BI.
A second let-go employee who had worked at the company amid political attacks and business-strategy shifts described the layoffs as "an abrupt end to a very chaotic ride."
While TikTok's cuts felt sudden to some employees, the company's plan to trim staff had leaked to The Information last week. Company executives Adam Presser and Zenia Mucha confirmed the scheduled layoffs in a memo to staff on May 22.
Since then, around 150 TikTok employees have been cut globally across countries including the US, the UK, Brazil, and France, four let-go staffers who spoke with BI estimated based on their communications with other impacted employees. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the scale of the cuts.
TikTok employs 7,000 people in the US alone, the company said in March 2023.
Let-go TikTok staffers wondered, why now?
TikTok's layoffs arrive a little over a year after the company restructured as former Chief Operating Officer V. Pappas stepped down, Presser was named head of operations, and Mucha was tapped to oversee communications.
Layoffs in the wake of a major restructuring are not necessarily a surprise, though several ex-staffers told BI they wondered whether last week's cuts were accelerated by the US divest-or-ban law that passed in April and would force TikTok's owner ByteDance to divest from its US assets. TikTok is challenging that bill in court.
"They say these cuts were after months of careful planning and assessment," the second laid-off staffer told BI. "It sure doesn't feel like that … Some are suspicious that they're cutting costs to make way for a potential sale if they need to go that route," they said.
A TikTok spokesperson said the company's recent layoffs had nothing to do with the current legislative or regulatory climate.
TikTok was notably absent from a wave of layoffs that spread across Big Tech in the past couple of years as companies like Google, Snap, and Meta trimmed head count as part of cost-efficiency pushes. TikTok, which is younger than many of its Big Tech peers, has been hiring in areas like e-commerce, even as the threat of a ban or forced sale looms.
