MySpace announced 30% layoffs today and showed more than 400 employees the door. Near the end of the day the company stopped doing terminations individually, say employees, and called 10 or more of them to a conference room at a time for a quick firing. One good thing – every employee got at least 60 days pay. It wasn’t generosity, though. The WARN Act in California requires 60 days notice for mass layoffs, and this is how parent company News Corp. got around giving notice.
But MySpace isn’t done yet. The press release clearly stated that the layoffs only applied to U.S. employees: “This restructuring plan crosses all U.S. divisions of the company and lowers the total number of domestic staff at MySpace to 1,000 employees.” Next up are international employees, and we hear that 100+ more will be cut across the nearly 30 offices MySpace has around the world.
The delay is due to legal requirements for notice in some countries, we’ve heard. But cuts are coming. And based on how poorly MySpace has done internationally against Facebook, those cuts may be far deeper than the 30% U.S. rate. Our best guess is that MySpace currently has 300 or so employees not based in the U.S. I’m guessing those employees will be busy updating resumes and downloading every file they have access to onto portable hard drives.