Snap reportedly laying off around 100 engineers

Snap is about to undergo another round of layoffs, with this one seeing a cut of around 100 engineers, according to Cheddar and CNBC. While that’s a small portion of Snap’s total headcount — around 3,000 people — it reportedly represents about 10 percent of the company’s engineering team. The cuts are expected to come within a week and will be the first focused on engineering. Snap hasn’t commented on the report.

This is the fourth round of layoffs at Snap in the past year, though the first three were much smaller, affecting a dozen or so people each. The cuts come amid struggles during Snap’s first year as a public company: the service has seen a slow growth rate compared to services like Instagram, which has rapidly expanded its user numbers since cloning Snapchat’s Stories feature; at the same time, its hardware efforts seem to be failing, with its work on a drone going nowhere and poor sales of Spectacles

It wasn’t stated what areas of Snap’s engineering team the cuts would come from. It’s entirely possible the company will be laying off employees who worked on hardware products it’s since moved on from, rather than people dedicated to the main app. Snap recently released a redesign of Snapchat — to mixed response — as a first step toward increasing engagement and fending off Instagram.

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