LinkedIn: Microsoft says 668 more jobs to go

LinkedIn owner Microsoft has announced a fresh round of job cuts, with around 670 roles set to go.

The social network company says the jobs affected are across its engineering, talent and finance teams.

It comes after LinkedIn axed 716 jobs in May and follows cuts at other big tech firms.

"Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business," the firm wrote in a post on the LinkedIn website.

The latest job cuts represent about 3% of the company's workforce of 20,000 staff.

LinkedIn makes its money through job ad listings and premium subscriptions and is used by recruiters around the world.

It has about 950 million users.

A slowdown in hiring along with a fall in advertising spending has hit the company, although it continues to sign up new members.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, the firm's revenue increased by 5% year-on-year, down from 10% in the previous quarter.

Since late 2022 there have been tens of thousands of layoffs in the technology sector by companies including Amazon, Meta and Google's parent company Alphabet.

In January 2023, LinkedIn's parent company Microsoft announced 10,000 redundancies.

All of these companies have been investing heavily in AI-powered technology, such as ChatGPT (backed by Microsoft) and Bard (owned by Google).

The US technology sector has announced more job cuts than any other sector this year, with over 150,000 layoffs, according to a recent report from US-based employment consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.