Atlassian lays off 500 employees as it refocuses on high priority areas

Atlassian has become the latest big tech company to reduce its workforce, cutting 500 team members globally. This equates to about 5% of its overall staff.

The Australian company made the announcement on Tuesday, stating that the most impacted teams will be in program management, research and insights, and talent acquisition.

The news was shared internally to staff as well as announced publicly by Atlassian. According to the company, this was not a financial decision.

The company stated that while it is operating in a “changing and difficult macroeconomic environment,” it had to make “tough calls to prioritise the most critical work for our current and future customers. While it helped us streamline work, we need to go further in rebalancing the skills we require to run faster at our company priorities.”

“To be clear, this decision is not a reflection of Atlassian’s own financial performance, as we will be reinvesting in roles that better support our priorities,” founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar said in a joint statement.

“As a company, we have massive growth opportunities in front of us, particularly across cloud migrations, ITSM, and serving our enterprise customers in the cloud. Although hard, this rebalancing will help us put more wood behind these arrows.”

“We are incredibly sorry for the impact this will have on you and your family. Thank you deeply for your contribution to Atlassian.”

SmartCompany understands there are currently hundreds of roles open at Atlassian, with more to be added in the future. We also understand that impacted staff will have an opportunity to apply for these roles.

Atlassian is just the latest in a string of large tech companies to be making large redundancies across its workforce. In 2023 there have been layoffs at Amazon, PayPal, Alphabet, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.