Slack, the business-oriented chat service owned by San Francisco tech giant Salesforce, is reportedly laying off staff the day after its parent company announced it would cut staff in the coming weeks.
The San Francisco corporate telecom company is reportedly laying off about 10% of its workforce as part of the broader Salesforce layoffs announced Wednesday, according to Business Insider, which first reported the news. At the time, it was unclear whether subsidiaries such as Slack and Tableau were included in Salesforce layoffs.
Salesforce acquired Slack in a landmark deal valued at over $27 billion in July 2021. This is a move that positions Slack within Salesforce’s broader suite of customer relationship management (CRM) products. This also meant that Slack would get some help from the industry giant when it faced a strong pandemic-era push from Microsoft and its Teams product.
The alleged layoff round has yet to be officially confirmed, but Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said Wednesday in a message seen by Fortune that Slack’s layoffs would have been more serious for an independent company. alluded to.
According to Fortune, Butterfield said, “The market changes we’re experiencing now are of a generational scale and today’s economic climate is as strong as we were when we were still an independent company. would be in the same position. He added that retirement benefits under Salesforce would be “relatively generous.”
If true, this layoff round wasn’t completely unexpected after a month of rocky management at Slack and its parent company. Butterfield announced he was leaving the company in December, along with the departure of Salesforce Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua and Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications Jonathan Prince. The news comes around the same time as Bret Taylor, co-CEO of Salesforce, and Mark Nelson, his CEO of Seattle-based Tableau, are stepping down.
The Puget Sound Business Journal also confirmed that Tableau, which was acquired by Salesforce for $15 billion in 2019, carried out layoffs this week.
A Slack representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a Salesforce spokeswoman said Wednesday, referring to a letter Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sent to staff included in a recent SEC filing. , declined to comment on the layoffs.