Some unfortunate news to report from GoDaddy this morning. GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani had the difficult job of announcing a round of layoffs at the company, the direct result of the impact the COVID-19 coronavirus has had on the company. The news comes less than three months after the company “pledged not to lay off employees for at least 90 days,” according to a Phoenix Business Journal article from April.
From what I understand from Aman’s letter to employees (and the public), there are 814 GoDaddy employees whose jobs have been eliminated, but more than 40% of those employees were offered different roles with the company. It appears the layoffs impact the company’s outbound sales teams in Arizona and Iowa. The company blamed the COVID-19 pandemic along with “regulatory developments” related to how the company can contact its customers.
In addition to the layoffs, GoDaddy announced it will be closing its Austin, Texas offices. Other restructuring related to its sales staff was also announced.
At this time, I do not know if anyone directly involved in the domain investment space have been impacted. It does not seem like the domain investor-facing Premier Services team would be impacted by the restructuring that was announced, but I reached out to a GoDaddy representative to ask for further details.
GoDaddy’s stock performance through the past few months has been pretty solid. The company’s stock was trading in the high $70s in February, dropped to the low $40s in March, and recently nearly hit its all time high of $83 first achieved in February of 2018.
Hopefully the impacted employees will be out of work for a short time. From what I have seen over the years, GoDaddy hires well and has an excellent training program for its employees. I wish for the best for those who are impacted by today’s news.
Update: A representative from GoDaddy told me “No domain investor facing employees were impacted.”
As an impacted lay off at GoDaddy, thank you for the well wishes at the end.
I am really sorry to hear the news. I wish you a easy of a job hunt as possible.
Courtney, Why were outbound people layed off? I thought Outbound was always very profitable and generated a lot of sales?
They outsourced their support to India…I know because I was on the phone just now.
Thanks to remote….lots of companies are going to remote work…$$$$ follow the money.
Lots of back end office work are going to India/Philippines.
The company said it was outbound sales staff that was let go – not inbound suypport.
I have a lot of friends that work there here in Arizona and they definitely still work there and take calls. I know they have different call centers depending on what part of the world you are calling from. Are you in the United States and calling the primary number on the website?
I use the online chat and the guy said he is from India.
GD gave me a promo code to use for new domain reg but it did not work.
They were nice enough to give me the domain free of charge.
IamAGal.com
Always put on hold when I call, chat online is faster.
Yes, BullS is Made in USA.
I prefer to use chat online for support because it is faster and I can cut and paste the error codes and GD can see it …
FYI- GD support is great for me!!
You going to see many inner cities going to the dumb/p…decays- as most people will be working remotely.
Housing prices in the suburbs will rise as people will like to stay in nice homes to work(stayvacation)
Office rentals will go down. Large office building will turn to condos and house the homeless.
If you don’t have any marketable skills, you will be dead in water!!
Jobless Future!!
Uhhh as a Domain-Investor Facing Employee who was laid off during the rise of the pandemic – this company is only interested in one thing: appeasing it’s investors and showing a “profit” on paper. This is BS. And the bit about offering employees other jobs internally is ALSO complete nonsense. Shut up Aman.