Automattic Starts Layoffs at WordPress.com and VIP

Automattic has begun layoffs across WordPress.com and its VIP enterprise business, TechCrunch reported on Oct. 21, and insiders expect more cuts.

At Ecommerce Paradise I track the platforms store owners build on, and this one reaches you if your store runs on WooCommerce, which Automattic owns, or on a WordPress.com plan. Nothing reported so far says WooCommerce, Jetpack or Pressable has been cut or degraded. A parent company that has lost its board, its CFO, its chief legal officer and an interim CFO in six weeks is still a vendor-risk event for any store that depends on it. If you run Shopify, nothing changes this week, and the lesson below still applies to every tool in your stack.

Here is what was reported and what is still unknown, the backstory from the September board fight to a June debt renegotiation, my read on who should worry and who should not, and six moves to make before Black Friday traffic arrives. A vendor wobble is the cheapest time to prepare, because nothing is on fire yet.

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Automattic Layoffs Hit WordPress.com, VIP and Comms Teams

TechCrunch consumer news editor Sarah Perez reported that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr, has started layoffs. According to the report, the cuts landed over at least the past week in communications, social, WordPress.com and the VIP enterprise business. Sources also told TechCrunch that marketing and product staff at WordPress.com were let go during October.

No headcount figure has been reported. Automattic’s About page lists 1,397 employees, per TechCrunch. For scale only, and as hypothetical math: a 5% cut would be about 70 people. Treat that number as an illustration, not a report.

Sources said the layoffs will likely be spread across the coming months, with the stated goal of improving fourth-quarter revenue ahead of a debt renegotiation in June. That timing comes from anonymous insiders. It does not come from a filing or an Automattic announcement.

Automattic spokesperson Chenda Ngak gave TechCrunch a statement after publication: “We’re staggering our organizational changes to be more generous with severance and allow more time with each Automattician.” CEO Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch the terminations were not above the company’s normal numbers. Asked about the growing total, he said he was “mostly focused on PHP,” a reference to the flaws I covered in my post on the PHP2Shell patches.

The people leaving include senior names. Megan Fox, Automattic’s director of communications, said on LinkedIn that her role had been “eliminated” and called her exit an “unexpected end.” Interim CFO Jeremy Klaperman left in early October, less than a month into the job, per TechCrunch’s Oct. 9 reporting. CFO Mark Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan were out in September.

What the reporting leaves out matters as much for a store owner. TechCrunch did not name Jetpack or Pressable as affected, and nothing in it describes a change to WooCommerce’s product, support or release schedule. The sourcing is anonymous insiders plus Slack screenshots TechCrunch viewed. No internal memo is quoted.

From the September Board Fight to a June Debt Renegotiation

The layoffs follow a month of boardroom chaos. On about Sept. 9, Automattic’s board voted to put Mullenweg on leave, according to Gizmodo’s reporting. He was back in control roughly 33 hours later. An Automattic spokesperson told TechCrunch he “was away for only 33 hours and 20 minutes.”

Mullenweg has called the vote a coup attempt. In a TechCrunch report syndicated on Yahoo Finance, he said he used his voting power, which he put at 84% of the vote, to regain control. Founding CEO Toni Schneider and board member Sue Decker resigned, and Gen. Ann Dunwoody was removed. A new board was announced to staff on Sept. 25. The previous board never publicly gave its reasons.

Mullenweg told TechCrunch that “the next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic,” per Gizmodo. He also told staff that, for purposes of Delaware law, he is the company’s CEO, President, Treasurer and Secretary.

The other thread is legal. Automattic and WP Engine have fought over trademarks since 2024, and WP Engine filed a motion for sanctions in July 2026 alleging Mullenweg destroyed evidence, per Gizmodo. The outlet says it is unclear whether the lawsuit is connected to the board dispute. I wrote up the first sign of financial strain in my post on the interim CFO exit, and this week’s layoffs are the next development in the same story.

There is a counterpoint, and it deserves space. Automattic says the staggered approach is meant to be more generous to departing staff, and Mullenweg says the volume is normal. Companies of this size trim teams all the time without any effect on customers. The anonymous-source framing also cuts both ways: insiders tend to describe the worst version of events, and Automattic has not confirmed the June debt timeline.

What Automattic’s Turmoil Means for WooCommerce Store Owners

My read: the layoffs alone are not a reason to panic, and they are not a reason to ignore it either.

Start with what WooCommerce actually is. It is open-source software, so your catalog, orders and customer data live in a database you control, and no layoff at Automattic can reach into that. The exposure sits in four places: the host if you are on Pressable or a WordPress.com plan, paid extensions and payment tools bought through the WooCommerce marketplace, support response times, and the pace of core releases and security patches.

The market position makes this more than a niche problem. According to BuiltWith figures compiled by Barn2, WooCommerce held 8.17% of ecommerce market share among the top million sites as of March 2026, up from 5% in 2025, against 20.4% for Shopify. BuiltWith only counts sites that use WooCommerce to take orders, so Barn2 says its results run low. Whatever the true share is, a lot of stores sit on this stack.

Here are the scenarios I would watch, with the triggers that would change my advice.

Scenario one is a quiet trim. Cuts stay in marketing, comms and enterprise sales, WooCommerce keeps shipping on schedule, and nothing changes for you. Most likely, in my view. Your action is to do the cheap prep below and move on.

Scenario two is a product slowdown. My trigger is a security patch for WooCommerce core or a first-party extension taking noticeably longer than it used to, or support tickets going unanswered for days. If I saw either, I would start a real migration plan. Compare options in my WooCommerce alternatives breakdown before the day you need it.

Scenario three is financial stress. The June debt renegotiation is the date to circle. If you read news of a lender dispute, a sale of a business unit or a sale of Pressable or VIP, treat that as a hosting decision. Moving a WooCommerce store between hosts is routine work, and my ranking of WooCommerce hosts shows what the alternatives cost.

Now the rough math, labeled hypothetical. Say your high-ticket store gets 4,000 sessions a month, converts at 0.5% and averages $2,500 an order. That is 20 orders and $50,000 a month, or roughly $1,670 of revenue per day. One bad outage day in Q4 costs that much, and a slow, panicked migration in March costs more. A planned migration for a 500-product store might run $3,000 to $8,000 with a developer and take two to four weeks. If you run supplier feeds through a tool like Inventory Source, confirm it works on the destination platform before you commit. Spending a few hours on prep in October is cheap insurance against paying a rush premium later.

What I’d do: nothing drastic. I would not rip out a working store because of a layoff story built on anonymous sources. I would hold the platform decision until a January review, run the six moves below this week, and let the evidence pile up one way or the other. A store that can move in an afternoon holds the cards in any vendor relationship, which is the real prize here. If support gets slower, if patches lag or if the June talks turn ugly, you act from a position of choice instead of panic.

Support is the part owners underrate. Plugin conflicts, checkout bugs and payment errors are what eat your week, and a vendor with fewer people answers fewer tickets. So keep a log of how long your last few support requests took to resolve. That baseline tells you in February whether anything has changed, and without it you will be arguing from a feeling.

Shopify owners should not feel smug. Shopify has its own risks, and I covered one in Shopify’s call for app developers to harden after hijacks. The point is not that one platform is safe and the other is not. Every platform is a vendor, and vendors get shaky. If you have not built a continuity plan, my e-commerce continuity guide is the place to start.

The same logic applies to checkout, which I laid out in my post on why your payment processor is a single point of failure.

High-ticket stores carry extra weight here. One order can be worth thousands of dollars, buyers research for weeks, and a store that is down or slow during a phone call or a long sales cycle loses trust you spent months building. That is also why I push niche stores toward fewer moving parts. If you are still picking what to sell, the high-ticket niches list shows how many profitable categories a lean stack can serve.

My guide to what high-ticket dropshipping is covers the model if it is new to you. And if you would rather not manage hosting, plugins and vendor risk at all, that is the problem my turnkey done-for-you service exists to take off your plate.

Want my team to scale the store you already have, on a stack that does not depend on one vendor staying healthy? See the scaling service →

Six Vendor-Risk Moves for WooCommerce and WordPress.com Stores

None of these cost much, and all of them make sense even if Automattic steadies itself next month. Do them in this order.

Map what Automattic touches in your stack. Write down every piece: WooCommerce core, any WordPress.com plan, Jetpack, Akismet, Pressable hosting and paid extensions or payment tools bought through the WooCommerce marketplace. You cannot judge your exposure until you can see it on one page.
Take a full off-platform backup this week. Export the database and uploads, plus CSV files of products, orders and customers, and store copies in two places that are not your host. The recent UpdraftCentral key theft is a reminder to protect the backup tool itself.
Move your domain and DNS somewhere you control. If your registrar is bundled with your host, move the domain to a standalone registrar such as Namecheap. Keep business email on a separate provider like Google Workspace. A host change then takes an afternoon instead of a crisis.
Get two quotes now, not later. Price a host move to Cloudways and get a comparison quote from SiteGround. Then price a platform move to Shopify if you want a fully hosted setup, so you know both numbers before you need either.
Own your customer list. Keep a current export of your email subscribers outside any plugin. If your list lives inside a WordPress plugin, move it to a standalone tool like Klaviyo so a host or plugin change never touches your marketing.
Set tripwires and a review date. Follow TechCrunch’s Automattic coverage, check WooCommerce release notes monthly, and put a calendar reminder in January and again in May ahead of the June debt talks. If you want a second set of eyes on your stack, book a discovery call and we will go through it together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WooCommerce shutting down?
Nothing reported says so. TechCrunch’s reporting covers layoffs in communications, social, WordPress.com and VIP, and it does not describe any change to WooCommerce’s product or support.

Does this affect the open-source WordPress software?
The reporting does not say it does. Gizmodo corrected its own story to clarify that Mullenweg owns WordPress.com, the hosted service, and not the open-source WordPress project, so keep those two apart when you read headlines.

Should I leave WooCommerce for Shopify right now?
Not on this news alone. Run the scenario triggers above and compare options in my WooCommerce and Shopify migration guide, which walks the move in the opposite direction but shows what a migration involves.

Is Pressable hosting safe?
TechCrunch did not name Pressable as affected. I reviewed it in my Pressable review, and if you host there, the backup and DNS steps above are the right hedge. If you decide to move, a host like Liquid Web is one option to price.

What is the June debt renegotiation?
Anonymous sources told TechCrunch that Automattic faces a debt renegotiation in June and wants stronger fourth-quarter revenue before it. Automattic has not detailed the debt publicly.

How do I check whether a plugin is still maintained?
Check the last update date, the changelog and the support forum response times, and keep a short list of plugins your checkout depends on. For stack ideas, see my dropshipping tools list. Planning a new store? Grab the free niches list.

Want 1-on-1 coaching to harden your store against vendor risk, or to launch a new one the right way? Get the coaching details →

I will keep watching this story as the layoffs play out. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news coming through the day.

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Trevor Fenner

Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and world traveler from Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.

He maintains homes in Seattle and Bali, spends most of the year overseas, and usually returns to Seattle for about a month each summer.