Report: Snapchat Cuts Dozens of Jobs With More Layoffs Planned

Snapchat parent Snap has reportedly laid off workers with more job cuts to come.

The social media platform cut several dozen staff members last week, Business Insider reported Saturday (Feb. 3), citing sources familiar with the company.

One of these sources said Snap is expected to make more cuts this week before the company reports its earnings.

PYMNTS has reached out to Snap for comment but has not yet received a reply.

According to the report, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel published a memo earlier this year trying to rally staff, stressing a sense of “urgency” at the company as it competes with Apple and Meta in the augmented reality space.

Business Insider also notes that Snap has struggled to reach profitability and is suffering from advertising losses amid a boom for larger rivals like Meta.

“We need our business to be strong enough and profitable enough to deliver the future of computing in augmented reality,” Spiegel wrote in the memo, titled “Social media is dead. Long live Snapchat!”

The report said many employees saw the memo as a sign that more changes were due. One of the sources says workers have been “on pins and needles” about job cuts recently.

But given Snap’s business performance in 2023, “it seemed inevitable” that it would reduce staff again, one of the sources said.

And last week, employees noticed that the workers in the company’s human resources office had blocked off their entire calendars for the day, something sources said happened just before Snapchat cut 20% of its staff in 2022.

The news comes amid a wave of recent layoffs in the tech space. Last month the technology sector cut 15,806 jobs, the most cuts made in that industry since May. 

Those cuts, however, were overshadowed by ones made in the financial world, which let go of 23,238 workers, the largest number of cuts in more than five years.

Among the companies that said they were restructuring in January were spend management firm Brex, which slashed 20% of its workforce; enterprise application software provider SAP, which said 8,000 employees will be either retrained or leave the company; and Amazon, which reduced the staff of Buy with Prime unit by less than 5% as part of its ongoing restructuring.