🌎 Multiple locations ∙ 👩 250 employees (25%) ∙ 🖥 Multiple departments
Mozilla Corporation, best known for developing the Firefox web browser, laid off 250 employees globally. The pandemic’s toll on revenue also caused the company to close its Taipei operations.
Going forward, Mozilla will shift its focus to new revenue-generating products, such as its VPN service, and other security and privacy products. It plans to reduce its investment in developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development.
Once the world’s second-most popular browser, Firefox has seen its market share dwindle over the past decade. Its primary revenue model, search engine ads, is susceptible to an economic downswing that curtails global ad spending. In addition, Firefox’s U.S. revenue comes from a recently-extended deal with Google, making Mozilla financially dependent on its rival.
In conjunction with the layoff, Mozilla’s CEO told staff that the company would be creating an opt-in talent directory, to be launched next Monday, August 17. However, the Mozilla layoff list appears to already be live, with over 50 former employees featured (see link 👇).
Mozilla is giving laid-off employees severance pay equivalent to base pay through December 31, along with health benefits through the end of the year.
UPDATE: The Mozilla talent directory is now officially live with over 120 entries.
Our live Layoffs Tracker has a real-time report of all startups that have done layoffs.