Snap is planning to lay off approximately 20 percent of its more than 6,400 employees, according to people familiar with the matter.
The layoffs, which Snap has been planning for the past several weeks, began on Wednesday and hit some departments harder than others. The team working on ways for developers to build mini apps and games inside Snapchat will be severely impacted. Zenly, the social mapping app Snap bought in 2017 and has since run separately, will also see deep cuts.
Another team that will see layoffs is Snap’s hardware division, which is responsible for its AR Spectacles glasses and the Pixy camera drone that was recently scratched after being on sale for only a few months. The company’s ad sales organization is also being restructured with Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer, who decided also to halt ads for Netflix.
This massive layoff shouldn’t come as a surprise as Snap’s stock price has lost nearly 80 percent of its value since the beginning of this year, and the company confessed in May that it would slow hiring and look for ways to cut costs. It then depressing earnings for the second quarter and said it wouldn’t forecast results for the third quarter.
