After Meta, Twitter, Amazon, THIS tech giant lays off hundreds of employees

Many big tech companies, like Twitter, Meta, Amazon, and many others, let thousands of people go last year in an effort to reduce costs. Around the end of 2022, ByteDance let go of hundreds of staff across several departments, according to a report from Reuters, which cited the South China Morning Post.

The parent firm of the video software TikTok, ByteDance, has laid off hundreds of workers from several departments as part of a cost-cutting strategy. Employees at the gaming and real estate divisions of Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok with 600 million daily active users, were affected by the layoffs. The lay-offs at ByteDance were first reported by the Chinese media outlet Jiemian.

Now, this isn't the first time that ByteDance has sacked staff members in an effort to reduce costs. A small portion of ByteDance's game development firm, 101 Studio, which ByteDance had acquired about three years prior, reportedly let go of a little over 100 employees in June 2022.

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Around 300 people worked at the studio at the time, although not every single one of them was let go. According to the corporation, several staff were transferred to different ByteDance departments. It now appears that the most recent wave of layoffs included the termination of the studio's remaining workers.

ByteDance now faces political uncertainty and national security worries over TikTok in the US, making the New Year crucial for the company. In 2022, thousands of jobs will be lost at other Chinese digital behemoths including Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding.

ByteDance-owned In India, TikTok was banned in 2020 per Section 69A of the Information Technology Act of 2000. The Indian authorities were concerned that the platform for short videos was gathering and exporting user data to China. 

The TikTok app, which was used by millions of Indians before the ban, was quickly taken down from the Apple App Store and Google Play store. In addition to TikTok, the Indian government has banned hundreds of other Chinese applications due to security issues.