The Microsoft-owned LinnedIn is cutting about 5% of its global workforce across four divisions, a reorganisation that lands at an odd moment: the company is growing faster than it has in years. The job cuts, first reported by Reuters, work out to roughly 875 roles based on LinkedIn’s stated headcount of more than 17,500. Affected teams include the Global Business Organization, marketing, engineering, and product.A LinkedIn spokesperson disputed the 5% figure but declined to share the actual number, calling the move “organizational changes” to position the company for “future success.”CEO Daniel Shapero broke the news in an internal email sent at 7 a.m. Pacific, telling staff the company needs to “reinvent how we work” with leaner teams pointed at top priorities. Impacted employees got a calendar invite within the hour. As reported by Business Insider, which obtained the memo, Shapero said LinkedIn will also scale back spending on marketing campaigns, vendor contracts, customer events, and underutilised office space.
LinkedIn layoffs land despite a 12% revenue jump last quarter
The timing is the awkward part. Microsoft’s most recent earnings showed LinkedIn revenue climbing 12% year-on-year, a clear pickup in momentum for 2026. The Sunnyvale-based platform still runs a wide business—recruiting tools, premium subscriptions, advertising, learning—and none of those lines look broken on paper. Shapero’s memo gestures at rising infrastructure costs and a need to fund longer-term bets, without naming any specific product as the reason.
The AI question hangs over the cuts, but nobody’s saying it out loud
Shapero’s email doesn’t mention artificial intelligence even once. One decision. But the marketing team’s own follow-up memo, sent by chief marketing and strategy officer Jessica Jensen, says LinkedIn will “embrace new AI-enabled tools and workflows” to make human work go “further, faster.” Jensen also flagged reduced paid media spend and a tighter geographic focus on the US and UK. The marketing memo points to accelerating LMS growth, agentic hiring solutions, and momentum with Premium and Small Business as the bets the team will fund instead.The optics fit a wider pattern across Big Tech. Cisco announced its own AI-driven restructuring on Wednesday, putting around 4,000 jobs at risk. Coinbase and Block both blamed AI productivity gains for layoffs earlier in 2026. Microsoft itself has cut nearly 7,000 roles this year and recently rolled out its first voluntary retirement buyouts in company history.LinkedIn, meanwhile, is leaning further into AI on the product side, having launched a marketplace where people earn money training chatbots in fields ranging from coding to nursing. It’s a pointed contrast: the platform millions of professionals log into to find new jobs is now doing the firing, while building tools that could automate parts of that very work.
Full memo from CEO Daniel Shapero to LinkedIn employees
“Team,Economic opportunity is one of the societal issues of our time, and LinkedIn has been and will continue to be the platform that professionals and companies turn to as they navigate the changing world of work. For us to meet this moment, we must ready ourselves to deliver a step change in impact across our products, businesses, and platforms, while continuing to operate more profitably.We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs.Today I’m sharing the difficult decision that I, along with our leadership team, have made to reduce roles across GBO, Marketing, Engineering and Product. If you are impacted, or proposed to be impacted in EMEA & APAC, by these changes, you will receive a calendar invite to a notification meeting within the next hour.For impacted teams, you’ll learn more about your org-specific information from your leaders shortly, and updates will be added to go/CompanyExchange throughout today.In addition to role reductions, we are scaling back investments in some areas including marketing campaigns, vendor spend, customer events, and underutilized office space, so we can focus teams on priorities that have the broadest impact with the highest ROI.You will receive details about these changes from respective functional leaders.I want to acknowledge and thank those who will be leaving LinkedIn. You have helped build LinkedIn’s culture and platform into what it is today, and I hope you are proud of the lasting impact your work will continue to have on our members, customers, and colleagues.For those staying, first and foremost, I would like to invite you to support our impacted colleagues. We will move forward together with focus and clear priorities to reach our potential as the platform that the world’s professionals and companies increasingly turn to.Thank you, again, to our teammates who are departing, and to everyone across LinkedIn who continues to show up and support each other.DanBCC: All Global Employees”
