Snapchat's parent company to cut 20% of its workforce: Report

Snap Inc had been planning the layoffs for the past several weeks, a report by the Verge said on Tuesday.

Snap Inc, the parent company of multimedia instant messaging platform Snapchat, will lay off 20 per cent of its nearly 6,500 employees, a report by the Verge said on Tuesday. Snap had been planning the layoffs for the past several weeks.

Snap declined to comment on the job cuts but its shares sank more than four per cent to less than $10 in after-market trades.(AFP file photo)

The job cuts started on Wednesday with the team working on Minis, small applications made by third parties which run in the Snapchat app, affected the most, the report said.

Stay tuned with breaking news on HT Channel on Facebook. Join Now

It added that Zenly, the company that was acquired by Snap in 2017 for social mapping, will also see deep job cuts.

Another team that would see layoffs is Snap’s hardware division, which is responsible for its Augmented Reality (AR) Spectacles glasses and the Pixy camera drone which was recently cancelled after being on sale for just a few months, the Verge report further said on Tuesday.

Snap declined to comment on the job cuts but its shares sank more than four per cent to less than $10 in after-market trades, news agency AFP reported.

After news started coming in about the layoffs, two top executives at Snap quit the company to join Netflix.

Netflix said in a statement on Tuesday that Snap's chief business officer Jeremi Gorman and Peter Naylor, the vice-president of ad sales for the Americas, will be joining the company in September.

Gorman will be the president of worldwide sales at Netflix, while Naylor will be vice-president of advertising sales.