LinkedIn has announced it will lay off around six percent of its workforce, in part due to a coronavirus-related worldwide hiring slowdown. The Microsoft-owned company is cutting about 960 jobs from its global sales and talent acquisition teams.

“[LinkedIn] is not immune to the effects of the global pandemic,” CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote in an email to employees. “COVID-19 is having a sustained impact on the demand for hiring, both in our [LinkedIn Talent Solutions] business and in our company.” He said “there are roles that are no longer needed as we adjust to the reduced demand in our internal hiring and for our talent products globally” and that these are the only planned layoffs.

Workforce automation is about to cost dozens of news contractors their jobs. The Seattle Times and The Guardian report that Microsoft is letting go of dozens of news contractors (about 50 in the US, 27 in the UK) after June 30th due to a shift to AI news production on MSN. The workers were responsible for choosing, editing and curating stories. People employed full-time by Microsoft will stay at the company.

In a statement to the Times, Microsoft said it “evaluate[s] our business on a regular basis” like most companies and that this could involve “re-deployment.” It stressed that the contractor job cuts were “not the result of the current pandemic.”

The company is reeling from the blow dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to WSJ, Uber’s ridesharing business was down 80 percent in April, compared to the previous year. Prior to the pandemic, ridesharing made up about three-quarters of Uber’s revenue. While UberEats has provided some relief, it’s not enough to make up for the drastic drop in ridesharing. Uber is now requiring riders and drivers to wear masks and developing tech to make sure drivers comply, but whether that will lead to more rides is hard to say.

Khosrowshahi said the company will wind down its product incubator and AI lab and that it’s reevaluating its freight and autonomous driving businesses. Uber is exploring “strategic alternatives” for Uber Works, its tool to help drivers find work at other companies, and it’s reportedly in talks with Grubhub about an acquisition.

Of course, Uber is not alone. Lyft plans to lay off nearly 1,000 employees, or about 17 percent of its workforce. And non-transportation companies have made deep cuts too. Airbnb recently laid off 25 percent of its workforce, about 1,900 employees. Those numbers don’t account for the drivers and hosts who have lost income as well. Meanwhile, Uber is still facing a lawsuit for allegedly misclassifying drivers.

There’s no question that losing your job is incredibly stressful, and since the COVID-19 pandemic began, millions of people in the US have been laid off or furloughed. In an attempt to ease some of the stress that causes, the mindfulness app Headspace is offering a free one-year subscription to anyone in the US who is now unemployed.

Anyone who qualifies can register at Headspace.com/unemployed. Headspace asks for the name of your most recent employer and your last date of employment, but it’s unclear if they do any cross checking or if this is an honor system. Once you sign up, you’ll get access to over 1,200 hours of meditation and mindfulness content, including sleep aids, kids content and mindful movement. 

Departing staff will get 14 weeks of pay, plus another week for every year they’ve worked at Airbnb, and will get a year’s worth of health insurance in the US. International workers will get health coverage through the end of 2020. Employees who’ve worked for less than a year can buy their vested share options.

Airbnb has a degree of cushioning. It scrambled to raise capital once the pandemic hit, including $2 billion in debt. All the same, it’s easy to see why the company would cut jobs to such a severe degree. While lockdowns are beginning to lift, it could be a long time until travel resumes in earnest, let alone until enough travellers are comfortable that Airbnb sees pre-pandemic booking levels. The layoffs might help Airbnb survive until that point without having to ask for more money.

Kickstarter has discussed layoffs as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages its crowdfunding business, and it now looks like those job cuts may be particularly severe. In a message to Gizmodo, the company has confirmed plans to cut a large portion of its workforce after the OPEIU (the union representing Kickstarter employees) said it had ratified a layoff agreement on May 1st. The union said layoffs could affect up to 45 percent of the workforce, according to a notice sent to Engadget, although Kickstarter disputes that number when it doesn’t factor in voluntary buyouts.

The terms could ensure a relatively soft landing for those who leave. The arrangement provides four months of severance pay and either six (for those earning $110,001 or less) or four (for those above $110,001) months of healthcare coverage. They’ll be free to work for competitors the moment they accept severance, and they’ll have “recall rights” to return to Kickstarter if a job similar to theirs opens up within the next year.

“Europe is a very important market for us and has been since the beginning of OnePlus,” the spokesperson told Engadget. “We’re doing some strategic restructuring in Europe, and in fact are even hiring in the region.”

One source added that the teams in Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and Belgium appear to be unaffected, as these are the markets where OnePlus apparently sees most potential. Several employees were also asked to relocate to Helsinki, which is understood to be replacing London as OnePlus’ new European headquarters.

One could easily blame the pandemic for OnePlus’ European restructuring, but signs were visible well beforehand. In the case of the UK, despite previous relationships, the OnePlus 8 series is carried by just one network: 3. For some reason, EE discontinued its partnership with the phone brand after carrying the much-hyped OnePlus 7 Pro 5G. Similarly, O2 no longer carries OnePlus phones after the 6T.

Ben Wood, Chief Analyst at CCS Insight, blamed OnePlus for struggling to expand beyond its finite number of fans, especially by shifting towards premium devices and thus even alienating some of its core fan base. The analyst went as far as calling the earlier OnePlus 7 line-up a “peak OnePlus” moment, as the heavily-invested OnePlus 7 Pro 5G that came afterwards struggled to sell. The phone quickly became a “firework product” when other more established brands like Samsung started delivering their 5G devices.

“Although OnePlus has had some notably strong relationships with carriers across Europe, there is growing evidence that it finds it hard to sustain relationships over a longer period,” Wood told Engadget. “This has seen OnePlus ‘jumping’ from one carrier to another with different generations of products. There also seems to be a growing sense that OnePlus has fallen into the trap of over-promising and under-delivering, which ironically is the complete opposite of how it behaved in the early days.”

OnePlus clearly has some tidying up to do, so maybe this is a much-needed restructuring after all. The company still has other tricks up its sleeve, namely the rumored low-cost OnePlus 8 Lite which may win old fans as well as new customers over. And let’s not forget the OnePlus TV line-up which are currently exclusive to India. We shall see how many of these will need to be shipped to make up for the checks for Robert Downey Jr.

Crowdfunding is taking a serious hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A Kickstarter internal memo from CEO Aziz Hasan obtained by The Verge indicates that new projects have dropped by 35 percent year-over-year with “no clear sign of rebound.” The steep drop has led to the company discussing “potential layoffs” with the Kickstarter employee union and finding ways to cut expenses, including cutting pay for management, capping new hires and being selective when filling newly vacant positions.

Hasan acknowledged that employees were “shouldering some part” of the uncertainty, and vowed to get through the situation “thoughtfully and transparently” to ease concerns as much as possible. The goal was to ensure Kickstarter was supporting creators and others for “the years ahead,” not just during pandemic lockdowns.

GoPro has announced that it will lay off 200 employees or around 20 percent of its workforce due to the coronavirus pandemic. It aims to reduce expenses by about $100 million by switching the majority of its business to a direct-to-consumer model. The company said that Q1 revenue will be less than half of what it was in 2019 and added that CEO Nicholas Woodman will not take any salary for the rest of the year.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as GoPro was starting to recover from its disastrous move into drones. The company saw a large jump in revenue in the final quarter of 2019 thanks to the holiday success of the Hero 8 Black. However, it expects just $119 million in sales for Q1 2020, compared to $528 million the quarter before. Its 2020 product roadmap remains unchanged.

In 2012, Boosted came onto the scene with its crowdfunded Loaded Vanguard light electric skateboard and has since produced a string of personal vehicles including last year’s Rev scooter. Unfortunately things may be nearing the end, as the company announced “the incredibly difficult decision to let a significant portion of the Boosted team go.” It cited the “unplanned challenge “of the US-China tariff war as a factor in its struggle, despite the many riders putting in millions of miles of riding on its products.

Since its launch, the “micromobility” field has become increasingly crowded, and there doesn’t seem to be a sure winner at this point, but as its CTO and CEO noted in the post, the need to keep capital flowing to maintain production and maintenance of vehicles is tricky. Now the plan is to “pursue strategic options under new ownership,” so we’ll have to wait and see what that looks like in the future.