The company’s gaming and real estate operations, as well as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok with approximately 600 million daily users, have also implemented the employment layoffs. According to a report in the South China Morning Post on Tuesday, hundreds of staff from various departments will be let go by Bytedance, the Chinese business that owns the video app TikTok, at the end of 2022 as a cost-cutting move.
According to the individuals, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not permitted to speak to the media, the decision has had an impact on the staff at Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok with 600 million daily active users, as well as its gaming and real estate operations.
With over 100,000 people worldwide and being one of the biggest employers in China’s tech sector, the job losses only account for a small portion of ByteDance’s workforce. Since ByteDance is a privately held company, it is not required to make information about its operations public.
In an effort to find the source of a damaging leak, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, confessed this week that a small number of its employees, some of whom were based in China, improperly accessed the TikTok data of American users and two journalists.
In a memo to staff members that Bloomberg claims to have seen, TikTok CEO Shou Chew apparently acknowledged the overreach. The allegations come after a lengthy internal probe at the business that was sparked by a Forbes report earlier this year that alleged the business intended to use the TikTok app to track the locations of specific U.S. users.
According to ByteDance’s inquiry this week, a number of employees had access to ID addresses and other personal information from a couple of reporters for BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times as well as an undetermined number of US users they were in contact with. According to reports, those leaker hunters were trying to determine whether the targeted users were close to ByteDance staff. Those endeavours were unsuccessful.
After telling staff in December that the company needed to “get fit and bulk up the muscle” to streamline operations, CEO Liang Rubo announced the layoffs.
In China’s tech sector, job layoffs are typically made in the name of company optimization, and firing underachievers is a frequent practise. In 2022, thousands of jobs will be lost at other Chinese digital powerhouses including Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding.