TikTok is the short-form video app, owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Since the app rapidly experienced user growth, it needed to expand its workforce and increase its capacity. Despite tensions with numerous countries, most notably, U.S.' Donald Trump administration over fears it could be a tool of China’s government, TikTok crossed 1 billion app downloads in 2019.
This made the app one of the fastest-growing app, ever.
As a matter of fact, the influence of TikTok's short-form video products in the social media sphere has inspired others to follow. One of them, include Google when it launched YouTube Shorts.
While further expansion is the way to go for companies that experiencing continuous growth, TikTok is doing the opposite.
In a global and company-wide restructuring, the company is said to lay off a number of employees, and eliminate a number of jobs.
The news surfaced when employees of TikTok that are based in Europe were informed that their jobs were at risk, and are told to expect invitations to meet with human resources staff in coming weeks. Some of its employees in UK were also warned that job losses will occur in a number of departments within TikTok.
When U.S.-based employees began work hours later due to the difference in time zone, some of them were also informed that their roles were being eliminated.
Plans to expand some teams inside the company have also been put on hold.
According to one of TikTok’s earliest executive hires outside of China, David Ortiz, a former employee of Snap, he was leaving TikTok because his role was being eliminated as part of "a much larger re-organization effort."
When asked, a TikTok spokesperson responding to a request for comment did not dispute that layoffs are taking place.
Read: China Had Clear Access To All U.S. TikTok User Data, Revealed Leaked Recordings
Among other reasons, TikTok is just like any other company out there.
While business goes well, the company also fears economic downturn that is happening globally.
Besides the company-wide restructuring, previously, the company also abandoned some projects, including its live shopping platform TikTok Shop, which is regarded as a major new revenue source, in the U.S. and Europe.
TikTok was created in 2018 after ByteDance acquired Chinese startup Musical.ly.
Its rapid growth has seen the company reach milestones after milestones that many others can only dream.
TikTok has scaled at an astonishing rate that no other app has ever seen.
Along the way, the company also drew drawing political scrutiny, and played a central role in social media war that is more destructive than that in the era of Facebook.
