ByteDance laid off hundreds of employees across multiple departments around the end of 2022. Here are all details.

By Sneha Saha: The tech industry is going through a tough time. Last year, several Big Tech companies like Twitter, Meta, Amazon, and many others fired hundreds and thousands of employees as a part of cost-cutting measures. According to a report coming from Reuters quoting the South China Morning Post, ByteDance laid off hundreds of employees across multiple departments around the end of 2022.

The report suggests that job cuts have been implemented at Douyin, which is the Chinese equivalent of TikTok with about 600 million daily users, and the company’s gaming and real estate operations. The company hasn’t yet issued an official statement on the job cuts. The report also stated that the layoffs have impacted employees in China only.

Now, this isn’t the first time that ByteDance has fired employees as a part of cost-cutting measures. Back in June 2022, ByteDance reportedly fired little more than 100 employees from part of its game development studio called 101 Studio, which ByteDance had bought around three years back.

Back then, the studio had around 300 employees, but the company didn’t fire them all. The company reportedly moved some employees to other departments within ByteDance. It now appears that the remaining employees part of the gaming studio have been laid off in the latest round of layoffs.

ByteDance-owned TikTok was banned in India in the year 2020 under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, of 2000. The Indian government feared that the short video platform was collecting and sending user data to China. Soon after the ban was imposed, the TikTok app, used by millions of Indians, was removed from the Google Play store and the Apple App store. In addition to TikTok, the government of India banned hundreds of other Chinese apps over security concerns.

In 2020, the tech industry as a whole witnessed the biggest layoffs of all time. Twitter, Meta, and Amazon layoffs were the biggest of all time. Elon Musk fired more than 50 per cent of the Twitter workforce in just a few weeks after the acquisition, following which Meta head Mark Zuckerberg announced to fire 11,000 employees. Amazon also let go of thousands of employees globally across verticals.

Reports suggest that the first half of 2023 will also witness layoffs in some of the tech companies. If reports are to be believed, Google is gearing up to layoff nearly 10,000 employees in the coming days. The tech giant has reportedly started evaluating the performance of employees with the help of its newly developed performance management system. Google employees are already worried and expressed their concerns about the new performance management tool, which is to help managers identify low performers. Now, people rated lowest are believed to be a part of the upcoming layoffs. The tech giant hasn’t officially revealed details of layoffs but CEO Sundar Pichai has been seen on various occasions warning employees to be more productive.