LinkedIn lays off about 3% of workforce

LinkedIn has said it is laying off hundreds of employees amounting to about 3% of the social media company’s workforce.

The Microsoft-owned career network is cutting about 668 roles across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams.

“Talent changes are a difficult but necessary and regular part of managing our business,” the company said in a statement.

The job cuts follow more than 700 announced in May, as well as thousands more this year from parent company Microsoft, which has owned the professional networking service since buying it for 26 billion dollars (£21 billion) in 2016.

LinkedIn keeps growing and said its annual revenue surpassed 15 billion dollars (£12 billion) for the first time in the fiscal year ending in June.

The service, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, makes money from advertisements on the platform as well as from users who pay to subscribe for premium features.

LinkedIn reports having about 19,500 employees.

Microsoft had a global workforce of 221,000 full-time employees in July, more than half in the US.

It is adding thousands more as part of its 69 billion dollar (£56 billion) acquisition of video game-maker Activision Blizzard, which closed on Friday.

As of late last year, Activision Blizzard reported having 13,000 employees.