Snap Announces Plans to Cut 16% of its Workforce
Snap, parent company of Snapchat, has announced that it plans to lay off approximately 1,000 people following advancements in its AI capabilities – accounting for 16% of its overall workforce.
The company is also closing more than 300 open roles.
Discussing the decision in a memo to employees, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, says: “We believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity and better support our community, partners and advertisers.”
The announcement follows a wave of AI-related layoffs in recent months, with newspaper Nikkei Asia sharing that there were 37,638 employees in the tech sector who lost their jobs due to AI in the first quarter of 2026.
A crucible moment for Snap
In late 2025, Evan shared in a memo to employees that Snap was facing a "crucible moment”.
Despite the company seeing growth in countries such as India and Pakistan – with Snapchat having close to 900 million global users – monthly active users have been declining in the US, the UK and a handful of European countries, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
To manage this, Evan says the company has “carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritise the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value.
“As a result of these changes, we expect to reduce our annualized cost base by more than $500 million by the second half of 2026, helping to establish a clearer path to net-income profitability.”
This has involved further implementation of AI in the company’s operations, which Even says is driving “meaningful progress across several important initiatives,” such as Snapchat+, enhanced ad platform performance and improvements in the efficiency of its Snap Lite infrastructure – a lightweight, data-efficient version of the Snapchat app designed for older Android devices or limited storage.
Layoffs at Snap
This is Snap’s third round of major layoffs in recent years.
In February 2024, the company announced plans to lay off 10% of its full-time staff, impacting around 540 employees.
In an SEC filing, the company shared that the decision was made to “best position our business to execute on our highest priorities, and to ensure we have the capacity to invest incrementally to support our growth over time.”
Prior to that, the company laid off nearly 1,300 of its employees, which accounted for 20% of its workforce at the time, after experiencing its slowest-ever revenue growth in Q2 2022.
The ‘inevitability’ of AI layoffs
Many companies have announced AI-related layoffs in recent months, with Amrita Ahuja, CFO of Block, saying that she believes more companies will follow in Block’s footsteps after the company announced plans to cut 40% of its workforce.
At the WSJ CEO Council Summit, Amrita said: “I think it’s an inevitability. As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little bit early than to be too late here.”
However, some critics have suggested that AI is being unfairly blamed for planned job cuts.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared at the AI Impact Summit in India: “I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.”