TikTok's Nashville layoff: severance is one month per year worked

TikTok is shutting down its Nashville office in early October and laying off 250 staffers.

Last week, the company told impacted workers they'd remain on payroll for the next couple of months before the office officially closed. After that, employees are being offered one month of severance pay plus an additional month of pay for each year they've worked at the company, three impacted staffers said.

TikTok emailed Nashville workers to tell them they were being laid off on the morning of August 5. It then shared more details during an office-wide video call, in which the chat was disabled and employees couldn't ask questions. The company directed staff to send individual questions directly to HR, a spokesperson said. Some Nashville employees with early shifts were already at the office before the layoff was announced, and were escorted out of the building.

TikTok's decision to shut down its Nashville office caught some employees off guard, while others told Business Insider they weren't too surprised after noticing a slowdown in new hiring or backfilling of office roles over the past year.

"Even without anyone explicitly telling us Nashville was at risk, people naturally started wondering whether certain teams or locations might eventually be consolidated," one impacted staffer said.

A TikTok spokesperson said the office is being closed "to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth." The spokesperson added: "We remain fully committed to providing secure, safe and positive experiences for the 200 million Americans that create, discover and connect with what they love on TikTok."

Many of TikTok's Nashville employees worked on its trust and safety team, which handles tasks like enforcing community guidelines and content moderation. These staffers work separately from ByteDance via a joint venture called TikTok USDS JV, which includes a mix of investors and Oracle. Oracle's stock page carries an Alpha Score of 44 out of 100, a mixed label.

TikTok has trust and safety workers in other US offices, including Seattle, California, and New York, as well as a large cohort in Scottsdale. It also works with third-party contractors for content moderation.

Ahead of the Nashville layoffs, TikTok was shifting more of its content moderation work to third-party contractors, one impacted staffer said. It also encouraged trust and safety workers to use AI tools to streamline their work, such as the internal AIME chat interface and the coding product TRAE, which are available to most company employees, two laid-off workers said.

TikTok's global team previously made cuts to its content moderation operations, including laying off hundreds of UK workers about a year ago as part of a reorganization and push for automation, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company has also trimmed other divisions in recent years, such as e-commerce and marketing, to meet shifting business needs.