Atlassian cuts 5% of its workforce

Atlassian, the company behind tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello, today announced that, after a reorg a month ago, it is now laying off about 500 employees. That's about 5% of its total workforce.

Atlassian co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar note in today's announcement that this move shouldn't be seen as a reflection of the company's financial performance (though it's worth noting that despite increasing its overall revenue in recent years, it continues to report net losses in its quarterly earnings releases). Instead, the co-founders are positioning this move as a "rebalancing" that will help the company prioritize the areas where it is growing.

"We’ve made hard calls to reduce our investment in specific areas, in order to reinvest in others," to co-founders write. "This is different to a financially-driven reduction, where you would look to make ‘broad-based cuts’ – for example, a 10% cut equally distributed across every org within the company. This is not what is happening here."

Specifically, Atlassian will cut employees in areas like talent acquisition, program management and what it calls "research and insights."