We are only 11 days into 2024, and we have seen multiple tech companies announce layoffs in the new year. The latest to join this unfortunate trend is Discord. The gaming-centric online chat and social networking service will be saying goodbye to 170 of its employees, which represents a big 17 percent of its total workforce.
The Verge got a hold of an internal Discord memo written by its CEO Jason Citron. He stated that the company has "grown significantly over the past few years". However, as many tech companies have admitted recently, Discord also increased its number of team members to a point where it could not sustain its business. He said:
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.
The 170 team members affected by this decision will get five months of salary, put one additional week for each year they have been employed by Discord. There"s no word on the specifics of the one-time charges the company will have to make with these layoffs.
Discord has been adding more features for gamers in the last year, including adding voice chat for PlayStation 5 gamers, and a way to stream gameplay from Xbox consoles to Discord channels.
So far in 2023, we have seen mass layoffs at several tech companies. They include Xerox, who let go of 15 percent of its team members last week. This week alone, Spotify announced 17 percent of its employees will be laid off and the Unity game engine company revealed a massive 25 percent of its workers will be let go.
Three Amazon divisions revealed layoffs this week, including 35 percent of the team members at its Twitch group. Google announced cut backs in its Devices and Services division, along with its Assistant and core engineering groups. Each will laid off several hundred employees.