Following other major tech
companies, TikTok has carried out a round of layoffs across its sales and advertising divisions. The decision affected about 60 employees.
A company spokesperson informed NPR on Tuesday that
the job cuts are a result of routine reorganization and include staff members based in Los Angeles, New York, Austin and abroad.
Social-media platform TikTok has become incredibly popular in
the United States, maintaining the top spot on the Apple App Store's entertainment charts and the fifth most popular app overall, despite a nationwide attempt to ban the app due to privacy concerns
over ByteDance's potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Even though over 30 states have banned TikTok on state-issued devices, the public's concern has dwindled.
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According to TikTok, the short-form video platform owned by ByteDance currently has over 150 million active users in the U.S. and over 1 billion users worldwide. Additionally, at $225 billion,
ByteDance is estimated to be the most valuable private company in the world.
The company's alleged reorganization efforts may be a response to recent attempts to integrate its new e-commerce
and live shopping feature TikTok Shop into the app. While ByteDance has shared its ambitions to grow TikTok Shop tenfold in the U.S. this year, to $17.5 billion, users are still slow to adopt the
evolving feature, sharing complaints about their For You page being cluttered by influencers selling products.
The job cuts also follow a larger trend in the tech industry, as massive
companies like Google and Amazon embrace Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s term “The Year of Efficiency” and continue to lay off thousands of employees as they map out their increased
investment in generative artificial intelligence (AI).
According to layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks tech jobs, over 10,000 people have been let go in 2024, following the 260,000 jobs that were
eliminated in 2023.
TikTok maintains about 7,000 employees in the U.S.