Despite some impressive growth over the past few years, BitTorrent has been forced to lay off nearly a third of its workforce, the biggest such shakeup of the company’s staff in seven years. The San Francisco-based company is trying to play this off as a “realignment” of its business but, with more than 40 of BitTorrent’s American employees being cut loose, its hard to see this as anything other than an act of necessity.
During the past few years BitTorrent Inc. has grown at a surprising rate, taking on increasing numbers of employees to fill various roles at the expanding company. On Thursday, however, things took a turn for the worse. Rumors began to spread that BitTorrent Inc. had laid off dozens of staff in its biggest shake up since 2008, yet no official statement was forthcoming from the company. Then on Friday two separate sources, at least one of whom was a former employee at the San Franciso-based company, revealed the scale of the layoffs. “About 40-45 people in their US office just got laid off which represents a large percentage of the US workforce,” one of the sources revealed. Another described the cutting of “around a third” of an estimated 150 U.S.-based employees. “The Ads team has been gutted as have several other groups – more development work is being sent to the BitTorrent team in Minsk. Only one person from senior management was let go, as is often the case in these types of things,” an insider told TF.
