Mozilla’s non-profit wing, the Mozilla Foundation, has announced a major layoff affecting 30% of its staff, and told the remaining workforce that it will no longer take part in advocacy.

The announcement, first reported by TechCrunch, was made by the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director Nabiha Syed in a company wide email to staff, which said that the organisation’s advocacy and global programs, two of the nonprofit’s major pillars, were ‘no longer a part of our structure’.

“Our mission at Mozilla is more high-stakes than ever,” wrote Syed, in an email shared with reporters. “We find ourselves in a relentless onslaught of change in the technology (and broader) world, and the idea of putting people before profit feels increasingly radical.”

“Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices,” continued the email.

Since the news broke, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications lead, Brandon Borrman, walked back that initial statement, saying that while the layoffs were necessary, advocacy would still be a central part of the Foundation’s work, but without providing any specifics.

Earlier this year, Mozilla laid off around 60 employees in the technical side of the business, with plans to scale back investments into projects like the development of its VPN and ended support for Mozilla Hubs, an open-source platform that allowed users to create and inhabit virtual spaces in a browser.

The Mozilla Foundation is focused on maintaining the internet as a free and global public resource, with a mission that includes advocating for privacy, inclusion and decentralisation, all while fighting to ensure the internet remains a ‘force for good’, a vision of the Mozilla Manifesto that the organisation counts as its central tenet.  

That mission has taken on even more urgency in recent years with the rapid development of AI, and the push towards generalised artificial intelligence, with Mozilla claiming that its position within the market offers it a unique opportunity to keep other Big Tech firms in check.

The executive team behind Mozilla are now leaving that mission in doubt, choosing to sacrifice what some argue is essential activism work for the sake of driving business goals, despite the Foundation and its subsidiaries reporting more than $1.2 billion (£932 million) in financial assets as of 2022.

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Of course, tech layoffs are nothing new. This year has already seen over 140,000 people across nearly 500 tech firms losing their jobs, with blame falling on over-hiring during the pandemic, rising interest rates, and shifting priorities due to AI.

Among firms that already cut staff this year are Meta, TikTok, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google, with jobs being lost across various fields from content moderation to software development.

Despite all those cuts, the UK Government could be about to simplify the visa process for overseas tech workers to encourage more talent into the country, and boost the UK’s AI industry, though with international Big Tech firms dominating the landscape it remains to be seen whether there will be jobs for the taking.