Mozilla Lays Off 70 Workers As Revenue Generation Programs Stall

Mozilla has announced that it has let go of several employees via an official blog post. In the post, titled "Readying for the Future at Mozilla," Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chairwoman and interim CEO, wrote that Mozilla has to do two things in this era including continuing to excel in its current work and innovating in areas most likely to impact the state of the internet and internet life in the future. Baker wrote that to change the future requires doing things differently and the allocation of resources for that purpose.

While Mozilla is making a significant investment to fund innovation, it says it has had "to make some difficult" choices that led to the elimination of roles at the company. The job cuts were announced yesterday, January 15, internally. In the blog post, there was no mention of how many jobs were cut.

We know from TechCrunch that 70 workers were let go, and an internal memo that was circulated by Baker specifically cited the slow rollout of the organization's new revenue-generating products as a reason for why it needed to shed workers. More job cuts could be coming to the Mozilla workforce.

The company is reportedly looking into how its decision will impact workers in the UK and France. Mozilla had about 1,000 workers globally as of 2018. Baker noted in the internal memo that the company expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products and higher revenue from sources outside of search, but that failed to happen.

Mozilla has decided to lay some folks off and restructure things. All the leads in QA got let go. I haven’t been let go (so far). No idea what I will be working on or who I will be reporting to. Some good work friends let go :(

— Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) January 15, 2020

Baker says that the people who lost their jobs will receive "generous exit packages" and outplacement support. The executive also noted that the company had looked at shutting down the Mozilla innovation fund, but decided it needed the fund to continue to develop new products. The tweet seen above from Chris Hartjes, who works for Mozilla, says that all the leads in QA were let go, but noted that the layoffs were organization-wide.

In other Mozilla news, Firefox 70 landed in October with performance, privacy, and Lockwise updates.