LinkedIn Cuts Hundreds of Jobs After Telling Staff to Reinvent Work

LinkedIn began a round of job cuts on May 13, 22 days after Daniel Shapero became chief executive, hitting marketing, engineering, product, and the global business group. California later posted 606 of those roles on WARN notices that took effect July 13.

Shapero opened the staff note with economic opportunity, then told the company it had to reinvent how it works. Revenue at the Microsoft-owned network was still rising.

Shapero’s First Memo Asked Staff to Reinvent Work

The email went to all global employees at 7 a.m. Pacific. Impacted people were told to expect a calendar invite to a notification meeting within the hour. Teams in EMEA and APAC were flagged as proposed for the same process.

Shapero, who was named LinkedIn chief executive in April after six years as Ryan Roslansky’s No. 2, did not put a headcount on the page. He named four organizations: the Global Business Organization, Marketing, Engineering, and Product. A LinkedIn spokesperson called the move regular business planning “to best position ourselves for future success.”

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.

Daniel Shapero, CEO, internal staff memo, May 13, 2026

He thanked people who were leaving for building the culture and the platform, and asked those who stayed to support them. The note was signed Dan and blind-copied to the whole company.

Hari Srinivasan, who became chief product officer of the LinkedIn Ecosystem in March, followed with his own note. Fastest teams, he wrote, are focused, have fewer layers, and use AI to move quickly. Product orgs were being rebuilt around that model.

California Filings Put 606 Jobs on the Calendar

LinkedIn never published a worldwide total. The tracker Layoffs.fyi logged the May round at 875 roles, about 5 percent of the roughly 17,500 people the company cited at the time. The only hard public register is California’s.

The California WARN notices filed May 15 list 606 permanent layoffs at five locations, all dated July 13.

CALIFORNIA WARN ROWS FOR JULY 13

Mountain View alone accounts for 418 of the 606, once the home-office line is included. Sunnyvale is the listed headquarters city. San Francisco is the 222 Second Street office. Carpinteria is a Santa Barbara County site with 21 roles.

Those California jobs are now gone. The July 13 date has passed. What remains unpublished is how many people in EMEA and APAC left on the same plan, which is why 606 and 875 should not be added together.

Twelve Percent Growth and a Thinner Payroll

The cuts did not follow a down quarter. Microsoft said LinkedIn revenue increased 12 percent in the quarter that ended March 31, the print Shapero inherited. That was an acceleration from 10 percent and 11 percent in the two prior quarters.

The fiscal year then closed with another 12 percent rise in the June quarter (10 percent in constant currency). Full-year LinkedIn sales were $19.8 billion, up 11 percent. Microsoft’s own year was $331.8 billion.

The company’s pressroom now lists more than 17,000 full-time employees, a step down from the 17,500 figure used in May, plus 1.3 billion members, 70 million companies, and 36 offices. It still advertises about 8,200 job applications submitted every minute, and 93 people adding a new role to a profile in the same span.

That is the oddity in the filing. A network that sells hiring, and that Microsoft is still booking at a double-digit clip, used a profitability memo to take people out of marketing, product, and engineering.

Who Reports to Whom in the New Stack?

The layoff was Shapero’s first large operating act, and it sat inside a Microsoft reporting change that is larger than LinkedIn. Roslansky ran LinkedIn from 2020 until April 21, when the company said Shapero would run the network day to day and report to Roslansky as executive vice president of LinkedIn and Microsoft Office.

Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn’s longtime engineering leader, became president of Platforms and Digital Work the same day, also reporting to Roslansky, with a brief that crosses LinkedIn and the Microsoft work apps Roslansky already held. Roslansky had taken the Office overlay in 2025, covering Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Shapero joined in 2008 as about the 300th employee and was chief operating officer from 2021, spanning sales, product, and operations. Roslansky, announcing the handover, said AI will transform how people work and grow in their careers faster than most people expect, and that LinkedIn and Office would sit at the center of that bet.

Read that way, the May memo is less a rescue of a weak unit and more a first pass at running LinkedIn as a tighter input to Microsoft’s work and infrastructure stack. The people who left were in the orgs that sell, market, and build the consumer network. The money Shapero said he wanted to move was labeled infrastructure.

Earlier Cuts Already Hit Engineering and Product

This was not LinkedIn’s first thinning. The same four letters keep showing up in the notices: GBO, product, engineering, marketing. The May round is the largest California filing in this decade of the company’s WARN history, and it arrived after several smaller ones.

LINKEDIN WORKFORCE CUTS SINCE 2020

1. July 2020: About 960 roles, roughly 6 percent, across global sales and talent acquisition under Roslansky.
2. May 8, 2023: 716 roles, including the shutdown of the China InCareer jobs app and cuts to recruiting and marketing in China.
3. October 16, 2023: About 660 roles across engineering, product, talent, and finance.
4. November 21, 2024: 202 roles, logged at about 1 percent.
5. May 13, 2026: The Shapero memo; Layoffs.fyi logged 875 roles, 5 percent.
6. July 13, 2026: The 606 California WARN jobs take effect.
7. August 11, 2026: LinkedIn closes its Tel Aviv research center, about 50 people, a site opened in 2022 after the Oribi analytics purchase. A small business team was expected to remain.

The 2023 pair already totaled close to 1,400 jobs. Membership kept climbing through every round, from roughly 700 million when Roslansky became CEO toward 1.3 billion. Headcount did not. People who have watched this company for a few cycles treated May as another turn of the same wheel, not a one-off shock.

On the Israel closure, LinkedIn used the same phrasing it used in May, saying it was focusing teams on the highest-impact priorities for members and customers. Tel Aviv still appears on the public office list.

Marketing Budgets and Empty Floors Fund Infrastructure

The headcount lines were only half of the note. Shapero said LinkedIn would scale back four spend buckets so teams could concentrate on work with the broadest impact and the highest return.

WHAT THE MEMO SAID WOULD SHRINK

• Marketing campaigns: Paid and brand spend is being pulled back while Marketing Solutions remains a listed growth driver in Microsoft’s LinkedIn commentary.
• Vendor contracts: Outside firms take a cut as internal teams are told to run leaner.
• Customer events: The in-person calendar that used to travel with sales and marketing is being reduced.
• Underused office space: Empty floors join the list even as the pressroom still counts 36 office cities, including the five California sites on the WARN sheet.

The destination for that money, in Shapero’s wording, is infrastructure and a smaller set of product bets. Srinivasan’s follow-up made the method plain: fewer layers, more AI in the way product teams ship. Microsoft, in the same fiscal year, kept raising cloud and AI spend while other groups absorbed severance. That pattern already includes a 3,200-job cut at Xbox.

A loud side argument tried to read the California notices against LinkedIn’s H-1B filings as a swap of local staff for visa hires. The memo does not say that. It names campaigns, vendors, events, and space, and it names four orgs. Those are the facts on the page.

Job Seekers Land Back on the Same App

The cruel loop is mechanical. LinkedIn is still the default place a professional updates a headline, turns on a green frame, and sends applications. Its own About page keeps counting those applications by the thousands per minute. People who left on July 13, and the ones in EMEA and APAC who got the same calendar invite, will look for the next role on the product they just shipped.

Shapero wrote that LinkedIn would remain the platform companies and professionals turn to as the world of work changes. He wrote that in the same letter that removed the people who ran campaigns, built features, and staffed the global business org. The company can hold both lines at once because the member graph does not shrink when the badge count does. Applications keep clearing. Profiles keep adding a new role.

The pressroom figure is now more than 17,000 full-time staff, $19.8 billion in annual sales, and 1.3 billion members. The May invites are old mail. The feed is not.