LinkedIn set to layoff 5 percent of staff, report says

LinkedIn is planning to lay off five percent of its workforce as job cuts continue to take a toll on the tech industry.

The networking-centric social media platform plans to tell impacted workers they’ve been let go Wednesday, sources told Reuters.

LinkedIn employs more than 17,500 people globally. It was not immediately clear which teams the workers impacted by layoffs would be from.

However, one of the sources noted that the cuts were intended to help the company reorganize teams and focus on areas where its business is growing.

The layoffs are not because LinkedIn is looking to replace human workers with artificial intelligence, the sources said. However, the layoffs come as U.S. companies named AI as the driving force behind job cuts for the second month in a row, according to a report.

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In April, employers announced 83,387 layoffs, a 38 percent increase from March, according to the report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm. Artificial intelligence caused 26 percent of those layoffs, making it the most frequently cited reason for workforce reductions for a second month.

So far this year, 49,135 layoffs have been attributed to AI, ranking it as the third-largest cause of planned job losses overall. It comes as more and more companies are relying heavier on AI, with major players including Google, Amazon and Meta pouring billions into the new technology.

Technology companies in particular have been trying to rework their operations with the implementation of AI. Jack Dorsey’s Block announced plans to eliminate half of its workforce in February, and Cloudflare shared it would undergo a 20 percent cut in workforce.

Tech giant Meta also announced plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, with workers getting notice of if they were let go on May 20.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in an internal memo last month. Meta confirmed the memo’s accuracy to The Independent.

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Meta had nearly 79,000 employees at the start of the year, meaning roughly 7,900 workers will be impacted. The company also said it would not fill the 6,000 open roles it had listed.

Additional layoffs at Meta are also planned for the second half of the year, sources previously told Reuters.

Layoffs.fyi, a layoff tracker for tech workers, has reported more than 103,000 cuts so far this year. The tracker counted 124,000 job reductions for all of 2025.

With reporting by Reuters.

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