Discord logo in flames

Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly

Discord logo in flames

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Discord has become a mainstay for many online communities in recent years, but its relative success hasn’t shielded the platform from the financial woes plaguing the tech industry. Like other companies making sweeping cuts to their workforces this week, Discord is laying off 17% of its staff, or about 170 people.

In an internal memo obtained by the Verge, Discord CEO Jason Citron blamed over-hiring — echoing explanations that other tech CEOs have offered for recent layoffs. The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday.

“We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,” Citron said in the memo. “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated. Today, we are increasingly clear on the need to sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization. This is what largely drove the decision to reduce the size of our workforce.”

Discord saw massive growth during pandemic lockdowns, but still isn’t profitable, the Verge reports. Last August, Discord laid off 4% of its staff — nearly 40 employees — as part of a company-wide restructuring. Many of the cuts affected those in marketing, design and entertainment partnerships.

It’s been a particularly brutal week in tech layoffs; in the last few days, video game engine Unity cut 1,800 jobs, Amazon-owned Twitch laid off roughly 500 employees and Amazon let go of “several hundreds” of Prime Video and MGM Studios staff. Audible, the audiobook company also owned by Amazon, cut 5% of its workforce.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/tech-layoffs-2023-list/

Twitch is laying off another 500 employees

Discord reimagines its mobile app to showcase its best social features

Discord logo in flames

Discord lays off 170 people, blames growing too quickly

Discord logo in flames

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Discord has become a mainstay for many online communities in recent years, but its relative success hasn’t shielded the platform from the financial woes plaguing the tech industry. Like other companies making sweeping cuts to their workforces this week, Discord is laying off 17% of its staff, or about 170 people.

In an internal memo obtained by the Verge, Discord CEO Jason Citron blamed over-hiring — echoing explanations that other tech CEOs have offered for recent layoffs. The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday.

“We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,” Citron said in the memo. “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated. Today, we are increasingly clear on the need to sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization. This is what largely drove the decision to reduce the size of our workforce.”

Discord saw massive growth during pandemic lockdowns, but still isn’t profitable, the Verge reports. Last August, Discord laid off 4% of its staff — nearly 40 employees — as part of a company-wide restructuring. Many of the cuts affected those in marketing, design and entertainment partnerships.

It’s been a particularly brutal week in tech layoffs; in the last few days, video game engine Unity cut 1,800 jobs, Amazon-owned Twitch laid off roughly 500 employees and Amazon let go of “several hundreds” of Prime Video and MGM Studios staff. Audible, the audiobook company also owned by Amazon, cut 5% of its workforce.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/09/tech-layoffs-2023-list/

Twitch is laying off another 500 employees

Discord reimagines its mobile app to showcase its best social features

Discord comes back online after widespread outage

The logo of the social network application Discord on the screen of a phone.

Image Credits: MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images

Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning. YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.

“This incident has been resolved,” Discord’s status page reads. “We are reviewing the updated rate limiting that triggered the initial session start issues, as well as the scaling targets for the internal service which limited guild loading during initial recovery.”

Discord says it is monitoring the recovery of multiple systems.

According to third-party monitoring website DownDetector, the issues began at around 10:50 a.m. ET. Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.

The outages across the multiple services come on Super Tuesday, a day when people across a number of U.S. states are voting in the primary. The outages, mainly on Facebook and Instagram, may make it harder for candidates to continue their outreach and remind people to head to the polls on an important day.

Update 03/05/2024 11:45 a.m. ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online. 

Facebook, Instagram and Threads were all down in massive Meta outage on Super Tuesday