Megan Fox, Automattic’s director of communications, posted on LinkedIn last week that her role had been “eliminated.” She called it an “unexpected end.” She was not the only one writing that kind of post.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr and the enterprise arm WordPress VIP, has begun laying off employees, according to TechCrunch, which reported the cuts on Wednesday. The reductions have run for at least a week and have hit communications, social media, WordPress.com and the VIP business. People inside the company expect further rounds.
A spokesperson, Chenda Ngak, gave a statement that treated the timing as the story. “We’re staggering our organizational changes to be more generous with severance and allow more time with each Automattician,” she said.
The company’s own about page lists 1,397 employees. That figure already reflects a round in April 2025 that removed 16% of staff, about 270 people, the first deep reduction at a company that had grown by acquisition for most of its life.
What makes this round different is what surrounds it. In September, Automattic’s board attempted to remove Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder who has run the company since 2005, and failed. The attempt lasted roughly 33 hours. When it ended, the board was gone instead: the directors resigned and Mullenweg returned as chief executive and chairman, with a reconstituted board behind him.
The executive bench thinned quickly after that. The chief financial officer left, then the interim chief financial officer, Jeremy Klaperman, within weeks of the board shuffle. The chief legal officer departed. Mullenweg posted on X that Klaperman may have been offended by the company’s decision to look at outside candidates for the role, while people familiar with the matter said he had been asked to reconsider.
Reporting on the internal aftermath has been unusually raw for a company of Automattic’s size. TechCrunch, citing screenshots, said Mullenweg at one point shared personal information about a departed executive in an internal Slack channel, connected to a health matter affecting the executive’s spouse, and wrote that the company was not providing COBRA coverage the person needed.
The layoffs are unfolding against a balance sheet deadline. People familiar with the matter said the plan is to spread the cuts over the coming months in the hope of improving fourth-quarter revenue ahead of a debt renegotiation scheduled for June. Severance costs land in the current quarter; the savings land after it, which is the arithmetic behind the company’s explanation for the pacing.
Automattic’s businesses are not uniformly weak. WooCommerce remains one of the two large open-source commerce platforms. WordPress VIP hosts sites for large publishers and enterprises that pay for reliability rather than features. Tumblr survives as a cultural property with a small, devoted user base and modest advertising revenue.
The portfolio was assembled over a decade of buying. Automattic took over WooCommerce in 2015, when the plugin was a small piece of an e-commerce tool chain, and bought Tumblr from Verizon in 2019, inheriting a social network that had already peaked. Both deals made the company larger and less focused, a trade Mullenweg defended as protecting open publishing from consolidation.
The distinction that matters to customers is between WordPress.org, the free software that anyone can install, and WordPress.com, the hosted service Automattic sells. Layoffs at the company do not touch the software. They touch the service, and the enterprise contracts that assume a stable vendor behind it.
The core product is in a slower fight. WordPress powers about 40% of all websites, according to W3Techs, and 58.8% of sites that use a content management system as of late September, down from 60.8% a year earlier. The decline is small in absolute terms; the direction is what changed, because for most of the past decade the share only went up.
Part of that erosion traces to the dispute with WP Engine, the hosting company Automattic accused of free-riding on the WordPress trademark. The fight went public in September 2024, moved into federal court, and is scheduled for a jury trial in 2027. Developers who build for WordPress have spent two years watching the two sides litigate over what the open-source project owes its commercial ecosystem, and a judge ordered WP Engine’s access restored in December 2024 while the case proceeded.
For customers, the practical question is continuity. A publisher on VIP, or a merchant running a store on WooCommerce, is not buying a brand; it is buying the assumption that the platform will be maintained, patched and staffed next year. Layoffs in communications and social teams do not threaten that. Layoffs in the enterprise business, if they reach support and engineering, would.
For employees, the staggering has a cost of its own. A company that announces cuts in stages keeps everyone in a state of waiting, and the people who leave in the later batches spend months working alongside colleagues who already know their own fate. The company frames the pacing as generosity with severance. It is also a way to keep the revenue-producing teams intact through the fourth quarter.
Mullenweg has run Automattic through a distributed workforce, a public fight over open-source governance, and a board that tried to remove him and then dissolved. He now has a smaller company, a new board, no permanent chief financial officer, and a lender to face in June.
The open question is whether the cuts are a correction to a company that grew too broad, or the beginning of a retreat to WordPress.com and WooCommerce alone, with Tumblr and the rest of the portfolio left to find other owners.
