LinkedIn Lays Off Workers as Part of Microsoft’s Wider Job Cuts

LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform, has announced layoffs affecting almost 300 employees across California, with a significant impact on Bay Area engineers.

SFGate reports that LinkedIn, the Bay Area-based company known for its job posting site and professional networking platform, has recently added hundreds of its own employees to the growing pool of jobless Californians. The company, owned by tech giant Microsoft, filed a WARN document on Tuesday with local officials, revealing 281 layoffs across the state.

According to the filing, affected LinkedIn employees were notified of their job losses on May 13. The cuts span several locations, with 159 workers in Mountain View, 60 in San Francisco, 23 in Sunnyvale, 11 in Carpinteria, and 28 remote workers residing in California.

The WARN filing indicates that a significant number of software engineers are among those losing their jobs. In Mountain View alone, 71 positions across three broad categories of software engineers, including titles with “staff” and “senior” designations, will be cut. Additionally, coding specialists working on machine learning, devops, and systems infrastructure are also affected. The layoffs extend to other roles as well, such as deal desk strategists, product managers, designers, and various other positions.

These layoffs at LinkedIn are part of a broader downsizing effort at its parent company, Microsoft. Breitbart News previously reported that the software giant was laying off security experts:

Business Insider reports that Microsoft, the tech giant known for its increasingly common security breaches and intimate relationship with China, is undergoing a round of layoffs that span multiple departments within the company. According to two people familiar with the matter, the job cuts are impacting teams in the security, experiences and devices, sales, and gaming divisions.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the layoffs were small in scale but did not provide specific numbers. The spokesperson also emphasized that these layoffs are separate from the recent job cuts targeting underperforming employees across the company.

One of the individuals with knowledge of the situation revealed that employees in Microsoft’s security unit began receiving notifications about the layoffs on Tuesday. The security division is led by Charlie Bell, a former top cloud executive at Amazon who made a surprising move to Microsoft in 2021 to spearhead a revamped cybersecurity effort.

Since the mid-May notification, several laid-off LinkedIn workers have taken to the platform to seek career assistance and express a mix of gratitude for their time at the company and disappointment over the job losses. One former employee, who shared a picture from what appears to be a hospital, wrote, “If I can beat cancer, I can beat this.” Another recounted the story of his own layoff, having planned to travel for a client meeting but ultimately canceling the trip for personal reasons before receiving the layoff notification. A third former LinkedIn worker bluntly began his message with, “Damn. They laid ya boy off.”