TikTok is laying off 75 Bellevue-based employees amid broader restructuring at the social media giant.
The cuts are mostly affecting roles related to the company's e-commerce division, TikTok Shop, which has a major hub in Bellevue. Affected employees are based in downtown Bellevue's Lincoln Square North tower, according to a Tuesday regulatory filing.
TikTok spent years growing its presence in Bellevue after first planting there in 2021. With the launch of TikTok Shop in 2023, the company's presence on the Eastside has stretched to include roughly 1,700 employees across two office buildings in Bellevue, according to a 2024 financial report from the city.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
In its Washington state regulatory filing, the company said the layoffs were necessary given recent restructures to the Company's operations. The company would not be relocating any of the employees or its operations to other cities, the filing said.
Affected employees will receive two months' severance.
The layoffs came two weeks after the company announced it was closing its Nashville office and cutting its 250 employees based there, according to a regulatory filing in Tennessee.
Last year, TikTok laid off 65 employees as its parent company ByteDance faced federal scrutiny and a potential ban if the U.S. version of the platform wasn't sold off. The cuts mostly affected e-commerce employees.
TikTok spun off parts of its U.S.-based business in January to avoid the ban. An investment group that included Oracle and several private equity firms bought a 50% stake in the joint venture that includes much of TikTok's U.S. business.
To make matters more complex, some U.S. operations remained under the control of Beijing-based ByteDance, which still owns a minority stake in the U.S. version of TikTok. After the deal went through in January, some TikTok employees continued to work for ByteDance under a business called TT Commerce & Global Services, Business Insider reported.
The 75 employees laid off Tuesday were under the TT Commerce & Global Services banner and therefore worked for ByteDance, not the consortium of U.S.-based investors who took control of TikTok's U.S. operations.
TikTok's layoffs add to the glut of employees cut from tech giants over the past year, a problem that has hit Bellevue hard as the tech sector's presence in the city grows. As of 2024, six of Bellevue's 10 largest employers were tech or tech-related companies, including Amazon, T-Mobile, Meta, TikTok, Salesforce and Pokémon.
The layoffs are coming from most of those companies as well. In the past year, Amazon laid off 1,285 employees in Bellevue as the company made historic cuts to its workforce between October and January. Meta has cut 756 employees in the city as it shifts its resources to artificial intelligence development and backs away from its metaverse plans.
Smaller tech companies have not been immune: Snap, the parent company of the social media app Snapchat, cut 56 Bellevue workers this year. Salesforce, which has a presence in Seattle and Bellevue, laid off 93 employees last year in Bellevue and cut more this month, though it didn't specify how many Bellevue employees were affected.
Bellevue-based video game studio Bungie went through a reorganization that led to mass layoffs in July, affecting 292 employees at the studio's downtown headquarters.
Between those companies and others like software maker Atlassian, tech employers have laid off more than 2,620 Bellevue-based workers in the past year. But it's not a problem unique to Bellevue. Since May 2025, when Microsoft kicked off a summer of layoffs, tech employers have collectively laid off more than 10,000 Seattle-based employees, with homegrown companies like Amazon and Microsoft responsible for about 8,850 of them.
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