TikTok has started laying off staff as part of a restructuring, Wired reported Monday, citing "five people with knowledge of the process."
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."
Wired's 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, told Wired that the number of layoffs would be less than 100. TikTok did not respond on the record to multiple requests for comment from Insider.
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, told CNBC in June 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."
Layoffs have spread through the Chinese tech sector in recent weeks including at TikTok's parent company ByteDance, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
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.
The layoff also come as TikTok faces a new wave of political attacks in the US. Officials in Congress and the FCC have 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.
Are you a TikTok employee with insight to share? Got a tip? Contact Dan Whateley at dwhateley@insider.com using a non-work device. For secure messaging via Signal, send a Twitter DM to @dwhate.
