TikTok’s Irish arm cuts headcount by 600 as legal provisions rise to more than €900m

TikTok’s Irish arm reduced its headcount by more than a fifth last year to around 2,100 staff, while the company’s provisions for legal and regulatory matters rose to $1.03 billion (€923.8 million).

The video-sharing platform notified the Government of plans to let go of hundreds of staff from its Dublin operation last year.

New accounts published by the firm’s Irish subsidiary, TikTok Technology Limited, showed the business’s average monthly headcount fell by 600 to 2,108 by the end of 2025. No details on severance payments to staff were included in the filing.

Staff costs fell from $245.7 million to $221.9 million as the Irish operation’s headcount was cut. In the same period, combined pay to TikTok’s Irish-based directors – Cormac Keenan, Elaine McGovern and Adam Presser – rose from $899,000 to more than $1 million.

Reports in recent months indicated staff at the Dublin office faced a new round of lay-offs, which could impact hundreds of more jobs.

A note in the recently-filed financial accounts said the latest “collective consultation process in relation to a proposed reorganisation” has concluded, but provided no detail of how many staff left the business as part of the process.

It added that costs linked to the latest reorganisation “are not expected to be material to the company’s financial statements” in 2026.

Last year, the Data Protection Commission fined TikTok €530 million and ordered corrective measures related to an inquiry into how the company manages data of its European users. The company has appealed the ruling.

TikTok Technology Limited’s latest accounts, which outlined a number of legal and regulatory matters faced by the company, show that provisions, mainly for legal and regulatory matters, rose to $1.03 billion by the end of 2025, from $916.1 million a year earlier.

It said the increase was “largely driven by adverse foreign exchange movements”, while $6.5 million of the $118.3 million rise was linked to rent costs for an unoccupied office.

A note in the accounts disclosed several other matters as contingent liabilities, including a Coimisiún na Meán investigation initiated in December 2025 over illegal content reporting mechanisms and a potential issue the company self-reported to the Central Bank this year.

Last year, total revenue at TikTok’s Irish operation, generated from support services provided to its companies and sales related to TikTok Shop, rose from $862 million to $1.14 billion. It booked a pretax loss of $203.4 million for the year, which was mainly related to currency movements.

The firm also booked impairment losses of $65.8 million during 2025, with $45.7 million of this loss linked to an unnamed abandoned data centre project and $20.1 million related to office fit-out costs for a leased building the company ultimately chose not to occupy.

Directors said TikTok did invest in other European data centre projects in 2025, including a Norwegian data centre that came online last year.

“In May 2025, we announced a €1 billion investment in the construction of a new data centre in Finland,” they added.

In the financial filing, the company also declared it reached an arrangement in January 2026 that will yield €100 million in compensation over the early termination of a separate data centre project.

The accounts did not specify if the compensation agreement was linked to a move by the company to shelve plans for a second Irish data centre at Echelon’s campus in Clondalkin, as first reported by the Business Post in March.