Reddit announced Tuesday (June 6) it would lay off 5% or 90 of its employees as a way for the company to cut costs and restructure its organization.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman emailed around 2,000 employees the announcement, according to the Wall Street Journal. "The team and I reviewed and adjusted our plan through the end of 2024," Huffman wrote. "We've had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond."
He added that the restructuring would help Reddit break even in 2024 and move money around to budget different projects. He also announced the company could only hire an additional 100 employees instead of the initial 300 planned.
However, Huffman did not disclose how the layoffs and fewer hires would affect the operations and functionality of the website.
Reddit was supposed to file for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2021 but has not yet materialized ever since.
The company also announced in April that it would start charging companies for API access due to the platform's discussions being mined to train AI chatbots. However, multiple subreddits and moderators protest Reddit's API pricing changes, and some of them plan to go dark on June 12.
Reddit's 90 job cuts are part of about 148,000 that were announced since the beginning of 2023, according to Crunchbase. Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have announced job cuts since last fall. Just this week, Spotify announced it would cut 200 jobs to consolidate its podcast department.
Related Article: Spotify Cuts 200 Jobs in Podcast Department in Reorganization Plans
