Social media firm Discord is laying off 170 employees, 17 per cent of its total workforce, it was revealed on Friday.
Discord CEO Jason Citron made the announcement to employees in a memo, in which he cited ramped up hiring in the previous years to the unmanageable surplus, which it is now relieving.
According to reports, the over $15 billion company is yet to start making any profits and has raised about $1 billion in funding.
"Today we are making the unfortunate and difficult decision to reduce the size of Discord’s workforce by 17%. This means we are saying goodbye to 170 of our talented colleagues. This is a decision we did not take lightly, but it is one that we have conviction in to better serve our users, our business and our mission over the long term," Citron said in his memo to employees, according to Verge.
He added, "We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020. As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.
"Today, we are increasingly clear on the need to sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization. This is what largely drove the decision to reduce the size of our workforce."
The layoffs come against the backdrop of similar moves by tech giants Amazon and Google, which in the past few months have let go of hundreds of their employees.
Even though Discord did not reveal the section of employees it was firing, its website still has several jobs listed in the legal, core engineering, data and product engineering, machine learning, people operations, consumer marketing, and trust & safety departments.
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