Snapchat Parent Company to Lay Off 100 Employees

Snapchat’s parent company Snap is set to layoff 100 employees from their engineering team following a tough few months for the company.

Snapchat has been going through a tough time lately. The company’s past few months of turmoil have now resulted in the layoff of 100 employees from their engineering team, representing approximately 10 percent of the entire team. The company’s largest layoff was initially reported by Cheddar. Snap has so far declined to comment on the firing of a large chunk of their engineering team. According to Snap’s 10-K filing with the SEC, as of December 31, the company had approximately 3,069 employees.

The company let a number of employees go in recent months. In January they laid off 22 employees and relocated members of their content team from New York to Los Angeles. Last October, 18 members of the company’s recruitment team were let go and approximately a dozen members of their hardware team left the company in September. Snapchat faced fierce backlash over a recent app redesign that even caused the creation of a Change.org petition to return the design back to its original look. The petition amassed 1,252,986 signatures causing the company to comment: “We hear you, and appreciate that you took the time to let us know how you feel. We completely understand the new Snapchat has felt uncomfortable for many,” the company said in response to the position.

Snapchat has also seen some major executives depart the company in recent months, such as the VP of Product Tom Conrad who spoke to TechCrunch about his departure saying, “I started making software when I was 18 years old, and it’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 30 years. It’s time for me to put my energy outside of tech, into music, food, photography and things closer to art than entrepreneurship. It’s easy to put these things off forever but I didn’t want to wake up 10 years from now and not have explored these other passions of mine.” Snapchat also lost their VP of Sales Jeff Lucas in February of this year.

The company faced a surprising crisis when Kylie Jenner posted a tweet expressing her disinterest in the app, which led to a stock market reaction causing Snapchat to lose $1.3 billion in market value. Jenner’s tweet was posted to her 24.5 million followers and received nearly 400,000 favorites and 81,000 comments.

Shortly after the initial tweet, Jenner posted another stating “Still love you tho snap,” but it seems that it was not enough to undo the damage done by her initial comments.