Australian employees of LinkedIn have been caught up in the Microsoft-owned platform’s global cull, with members of local senior leadership among those eliminated as the company moves to tighten costs.
The Australian redundancies – about 10 in total – form part of a 5 per cent reduction to LinkedIn’s global workforce of more than 17,500 full-time staff. The cull, thought to number about 875, was announced on Thursday and first reported by Reuters.
Two sources confirmed some members of the professional networking platform’s Australian leadership team were among those to lose their jobs.
“Australian leadership [at LinkedIn] has been gutted,” one source who requested anonymity told this masthead.
The specific teams affected in Australia have not been confirmed and a LinkedIn spokesman disputed the 5 per cent figure when contacted by this masthead, but would not provide further details.
“As part of our regular business planning, we’ve implemented organisational changes to best position ourselves for future success,” the spokesman said.
The latest disclosures from LinkedIn, from 2024, say it employs about 350 staff locally, and the company has offices in Sydney and Melbourne. The job cuts come almost exactly a year after the platform made cuts to its Australian operations, primarily to its editorial teams, who were spared this time around.
The bloodletting comes despite LinkedIn reporting accelerating revenue growth. Microsoft’s most recent financials show the platform – which sells recruiting tools and premium subscriptions – posted a 12 per cent year-on-year revenue increase in its most recent quarter.
The company’s chief marketing officer, Jessica Jensen, told staff in an internal memo that the redundancies were nonetheless necessary because “growth is more competitive, infrastructure costs continue to rise and AI is reshaping how work gets done”. The memo’s contents were first reported by Business Insider.
Jensen’s memo outlined three pillars driving the reorganisation: reducing paid media and program spending while concentrating investment in markets with the highest return; doubling down on growth areas including AI-powered hiring tools, LinkedIn’s premium tier and small business offerings; and consolidating teams doing similar work while embedding AI tools and workflows to accelerate output.
“Our organisational changes are across three areas,” Jensen wrote, adding the company would “embrace new AI-enabled tools and workflows that allow our human creativity and judgment to go further, faster”.
The cuts are the latest in a growing wave of lay-offs affecting the tech sector. Cisco announced an AI-driven restructuring on Thursday affecting approximately 4000 roles, while Block, WiseTech, Atlassian and Coinbase have each cited AI productivity gains as part of the rationale for their own cuts earlier this year.
Layoff-tracking site Layoffs.fyi has tallied more than 103,000 technology sector roles eliminated globally so far in 2026, approaching the 124,000 cuts recorded across the entirety of 2025. LinkedIn’s parent Microsoft has itself shed close to 7000 employees this year, roughly 3 per cent of its workforce, and has offered voluntary retirement buyouts to approximately 7 per cent of its US staff.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella was in Australia last month spruiking his company’s $25 billion investment in Australian data centres and AI, and acknowledged that some jobs would be lost amid AI’s rampant uptake across workplaces.
“I’m not saying that there won’t be displacement, which is why investments we are making in skilling for areas that have a job market are critical,” he said. “Some jobs may have to change, but there may be some new jobs that get created. Will there be turmoil and all of that? Yes, but at a global scale, we all will have to do our job to make sure that, quite frankly, we have social permission to do what we’re doing.”
Natalie MacDonald, an Australian former LinkedIn employee who was made redundant almost exactly a year ago – just six weeks after returning from parental leave – said she was expecting further cuts to come across the sector.
“This announcement is the starting gun on what will now be weeks of confusion and discombobulation for those whose roles have been impacted, as well as those left behind to do the work next to empty desks where their friends and colleagues used to sit,” she told this masthead.
“In an organisation of LinkedIn’s size and geographical diversity – and the various workplace laws that come with it – it can often be hours, weeks, and in some parts of the world months, to fully grasp which roles have been reduced. It can be really lonely at a time when, frankly, you need your community the most.”
MacDonald, who now works in brand consulting, hosting and media work, said the cuts carry a particular irony given LinkedIn’s core purpose.
“Redundancy has a strange way of shaking not just your financial security, but your sense of professional identity, particularly at a company like LinkedIn, where so much of the platform’s purpose is tied to careers, visibility and opportunity,” she said.
“When you’ve spent years helping people build careers and connecting them with economic opportunity, experiencing that loss yourself can feel deeply disorienting.”
LinkedIn was recently excluded from a planned federal government scheme to force big tech to pay for its use of media reporting despite the social networking site promoting news articles and its parent company’s multibillion-dollar Australian business. That decision could save Microsoft about $170 million and has angered the technology giants that are included.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.