Sources: Snap laid off about 24 people across 8 teams, mostly in the content unit that curates users' videos; some staff were asked to relocate to Los Angeles
Snapchat parent Snap Inc. laid off roughly two dozen people across 8 different teams on Thursday, people familiar with the matter told Cheddar.
Context & Ripple Effects
This small cut — about 24 people across eight teams, concentrated in the unit curating user videos — was the opening move in what became a multi-year restructuring at Snap. Within weeks it widened into the largest engineering layoffs in the company's history and then roughly 100 advertising-side cuts that sources described as the final step of that restructuring.
First-order effects
- Snap's content curation operation loses most of its headcount immediately, with remaining staff asked to consolidate in Los Angeles — centralizing video editorial work around headquarters.
- Affected employees across the other seven teams exit a company that had been expanding into original and curated content.
Second-order effects
- The targeting of the content unit foreshadowed Snap's retreat from editorial video: by 2022 the company went further and canceled its original shows outright alongside a 20% staff reduction.
- Each successive round — engineering in early 2018, ads, then hardware and games in 2022 — forced Snap's content and creator partners to plan around a shrinking slate of company-funded programming.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held well past this round: further reductions in 2024 (~10% of global staff) and Spiegel's announced ~1,000-person, 16% cut aimed at profitability show Snap normalizing recurring downsizing as a cost discipline rather than one-off restructuring.
- If the trajectory continues, Snap's role shifts from funding curated and original content toward leaner platform operations, with creator monetization tools carrying more of the content burden than internal teams.
The trend: Snap has spent the years since this first 2018 cut converting episodic layoffs into a standing cost-reduction playbook, steadily exiting company-produced content in favor of a leaner core platform.