Vimeo this month conducted mass layoffs affecting what sources describe as the majority of its workforce, including the entire video engineering team responsible for core platform infrastructure. The cuts occurred less than four months after Bending Spoons acquired the video platform for $1.38 billion in an all-cash transaction announced September 10, 2025.

Derek Buitenhuis, a former Vimeo engineer who left after the acquisition announcement, posted on January 21, 2026, that "almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off yesterday, including the entire video team." According to the post, Buitenhuis had already departed before the January 20 layoffs. Multiple affected employees confirmed the dismissals through social media channels, with some indicating they were among contributors to FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing across much of the internet.

The FFmpeg project, which describes itself as "the leading multimedia framework," responded directly to the layoffs. "Many Vimeo staff were FFmpeg contributors," the project stated in a January 22 post. The timing creates particular concern within the open source community given that FFmpeg separately announced it faces sustainability challenges from an overwhelming volume of low-quality bug reports allegedly generated through artificial intelligence tools.

How the acquisition unfolded from announcement to elimination

Bending Spoons, based in Milan, paid $7.85 per share for Vimeo's outstanding stock. The purchase price represented a 91% premium over Vimeo's 60-day volume-weighted average share price as of September 9, 2025. Glenn Schiffman, Vimeo's board chairman, characterized the transaction as delivering "compelling, certain value to Vimeo shareholders."

The definitive agreement included standard language about Vimeo's "talented engineers" and commitment to the creator community. According to the September announcement, Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari stated the company acquires businesses "with the expectation of owning and operating them indefinitely." Ferrari specifically promised "ambitious investments in the US and other priority markets, and all key areas of the business, spanning both the creator and enterprise offerings."

That commitment lasted 132 days before the reported mass terminations.

Bending Spoons conducted an initial reduction of 10% of Vimeo's workforce immediately following the November 2024 completion date. According to Business Insider reporting cited in German publication heise online, the January 2026 layoffs represent a second, substantially larger wave of eliminations. The Italian company confirmed layoffs occurred but declined to specify the number of affected positions.

Former employees reported the cuts extended across multiple departments. One engineer noted that departures included specialists in video encoding, streaming infrastructure, content delivery, and platform architecture - the technical expertise that differentiated Vimeo as a video platform rather than a generic hosting service.

Why FFmpeg contributions matter beyond one company

FFmpeg processes video for YouTube, Netflix, VLC media player, Chrome browsers, and countless other applications requiring multimedia capabilities. The framework supports thousands of video and audio codecs, container formats, and streaming protocols. When FFmpeg contributors lose their positions, the impact extends beyond their immediate employer.

According to FFmpeg's website, the project "tries to provide the best technically possible solution for developers of applications and end users alike." The framework includes libavcodec for encoding and decoding, libavformat for multimedia container handling, libavfilter for media filtering, and other libraries that applications integrate to process video and audio. The command-line tools ffmpeg, ffplay, and ffprobe serve end users for transcoding and playback.

Vimeo employed engineers with deep expertise in video compression, transcoding pipelines, and adaptive bitrate streaming - precisely the domains where FFmpeg requires ongoing development. The company processed billions of video views monthly, providing real-world testing grounds for codec implementations and streaming optimizations.

Ben Adelman, who worked at Vimeo from 2022 to 2024, provided context about the company's condition before private equity involvement. "The company was in serious decline long before PE stepped in," according to a January 23 post. Adelman noted that CEO Anjali Sud took Vimeo public but "growth failed to materialize after COVID and the stock turned into a penny stock within a year."

The decline Adelman described helps explain why Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo at what appeared to be a substantial premium. The 91% increase over the 60-day average came from a stock that had crashed from public market enthusiasm to penny stock status. What looked like generosity represented opportunistic purchasing of distressed technology assets.

The Bending Spoons playbook: acquire, eliminate, automate

Bending Spoons has executed this pattern across numerous acquisitions since 2013. The company acquired Evernote in November 2022, then laid off the entire U.S. workforce in July 2023 and relocated operations to Europe. The company acquired Meetup in January 2024, followed by workforce reductions. WeTransfer's acquisition in July 2024 preceded announcements that 75% of staff would be eliminated.

According to Wikipedia documentation of Bending Spoons' history, the pattern extends across FiLMiC Pro (acquired September 2022, original team of 22 laid off by December 2023), Mosaic Group (acquired January 2024, entire 330-person workforce terminated as they weren't included in the asset purchase), and multiple other transactions.

The company raised approximately $700 million in equity and $3 billion in debt financing to fund these acquisitions. Bending Spoons operates with substantially lower labor costs by relocating operations to Italy and other European locations where engineering salaries remain far below Silicon Valley standards.

Luca Ferrari, in social media discussions about the company's strategy, acknowledged the approach but emphasized that Bending Spoons pays competitive salaries in Italian context. "While Italy's salaries are not as high as other countries, to hire top talent we need to be competitive at the global/European level so we pay top salaries," Ferrari stated.

Industry observers characterize the model as classic software asset optimization: purchase underperforming businesses with real user bases, eliminate expensive labor, relocate engineering to lower-cost markets, increase subscription prices, and operate with minimal staffing. The strategy maximizes short-term profitability regardless of long-term product sustainability.

What users noticed when the cuts happened

Vimeo's website began displaying new messaging describing itself as an "AI-powered video platform" around the same time as the layoffs. Users noticed the terminology change and connected it to the staff eliminations. The timing suggested Bending Spoons plans to replace human engineering expertise with automated systems.

Vimeo was founded in 2004, making it slightly older than YouTube. The company positioned itself as a premium alternative emphasizing video quality and serving professional creators. IAC purchased Vimeo in 2006 and increasingly oriented the platform toward business applications. Vimeo went public as an independent company in 2021.

The business struggled to compete with YouTube's scale and network effects. Despite positioning for enterprise customers and professional creators, Vimeo never achieved the revenue growth public markets demanded. The stock declined from its 2021 initial public offering price of $10 per share to penny stock territory before Bending Spoons' acquisition offer.

Professional video creators expressed frustration with the shift toward AI positioning. "Position yourself as a filmmaker platform for years and then do the only thing that will make every filmmaker go mad, that's high level trolling," one user commented. Another characterized the acquisition result as "killed by private equity in a technology company skin suit."

The AI messaging raised questions about whether Bending Spoons intends to automate video processing, transcoding, and platform operations previously handled by specialized engineers. While artificial intelligence can perform some routine video tasks, complex encoding optimization, codec implementation, and streaming infrastructure typically require human expertise.

Where the open source community stands after these cuts

FFmpeg separately faces challenges stemming from what the project characterized as a flood of low-quality bug reports. The project posted on January 22 that "FFmpeg suffers from the same issues" facing Daniel Stenberg's cURL project, which announced plans to potentially shut down its bug bounty program due to AI-generated spam submissions.

According to FFmpeg's post, the project now receives numerous submissions that appear generated by large language models rather than genuine security researchers. These reports consume maintainer time investigating issues that don't exist or duplicate previously reported problems. The situation became severe enough that FFmpeg publicly declared solidarity with Stenberg's decision.

The combination of skilled contributors losing employment and spam reports consuming remaining maintainers' time creates sustainability concerns for critical open source infrastructure. FFmpeg has no corporate backing comparable to Linux Foundation support for the Linux kernel or Microsoft's investment in Git development.

Vimeo's former engineering team included specialists in video codec optimization, streaming protocol implementation, and large-scale transcoding infrastructure - expertise directly applicable to FFmpeg development. These engineers contributed improvements based on challenges encountered processing billions of video views, providing real-world validation of codec implementations and streaming techniques.

When companies eliminate entire engineering teams, open source projects lose more than individual contributors. They lose institutional knowledge, testing infrastructure, and problem discovery that comes from operating at scale. A team processing Vimeo's video volume encounters edge cases and optimization opportunities that developers working on smaller applications never see.

The layoffs occurred during a period when video technology faces significant challenges. New codec standards including AV1 and VVC require ongoing implementation work. Streaming protocols continue evolving to handle higher resolutions and lower latencies. Content protection and digital rights management create technical complexity. All of these areas benefit from engineers employed by companies processing massive video volumes.

What comes next for the people and the platform

Affected employees began searching for new positions across the technology industry. Buitenhuis noted that "there are a few on the market" for companies seeking "talented engineers." Multiple recruitment efforts appeared on social media offering roles at companies needing video expertise.

Matt Taylor, with a media team at an unnamed company, posted about "at least one FE engineering role on our media team open" and included an application link. Others extended offers to connect affected workers with opportunities at their organizations.

Vimeo will operate with substantially reduced headcount under Bending Spoons ownership. The company serves millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers who depend on video hosting infrastructure. Whether the platform can maintain service quality and feature development with a skeleton staff remains uncertain.

The business model appears to shift toward extracting maximum revenue from existing customers rather than developing new capabilities. Bending Spoons has demonstrated willingness to raise prices substantially across acquired properties while reducing feature development investment.

For the video platform market, the elimination of Vimeo's engineering team removes a significant competitor to YouTube and other hosting services. Despite never achieving YouTube's scale, Vimeo provided an alternative for creators and businesses seeking different features, pricing structures, and platform policies.

The January 2026 layoffs concluded a four-month period from acquisition announcement to workforce elimination. Bending Spoons acquired a functioning video platform with established technology infrastructure and eliminated most of the people who built and maintained that infrastructure. What remains is a collection of software systems and customer contracts operated by a minimal staff reporting to Milan headquarters.

Timeline

  • 2004: Vimeo founded in New York City
  • 2006: IAC acquires Vimeo
  • 2013: Bending Spoons founded in Copenhagen, later relocates to Milan
  • 2021: Vimeo goes public as independent company
  • November 2022: Bending Spoons acquires Evernote, begins pattern of post-acquisition workforce reductions
  • September 10, 2025: Vimeo announces agreement to be acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.38 billion ($7.85 per share)
  • November 2025: Acquisition closes, Bending Spoons conducts initial 10% workforce reduction
  • January 20, 2026: Mass layoffs eliminate substantial portion of Vimeo workforce including entire video team
  • January 21, 2026: Derek Buitenhuis publicly discloses layoffs on social media
  • January 22, 2026: FFmpeg project confirms many Vimeo staff were contributors to open source multimedia framework
  • January 23, 2026: Bending Spoons confirms layoffs occurred but declines to specify number of positions affected

Summary

Who: Bending Spoons, an Italian technology conglomerate based in Milan, conducted mass layoffs at Vimeo affecting the majority of the video platform's workforce. Affected employees included the entire video engineering team and multiple contributors to the FFmpeg open source project. Derek Buitenhuis, a former Vimeo engineer, publicly disclosed the cuts.

What: Vimeo eliminated what sources describe as most of its staff in a second wave of layoffs following the November 2025 acquisition completion. The cuts affected video engineers, streaming specialists, platform developers, and other technical roles responsible for core infrastructure. The eliminations occurred approximately 132 days after Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari promised "ambitious investments" in the business.

When: The layoffs occurred on January 20, 2026, less than four months after Bending Spoons announced the $1.38 billion acquisition on September 10, 2025, and approximately two months after the November 2025 transaction closing. An initial 10% workforce reduction had occurred immediately following the acquisition's completion.

Where: Vimeo, founded in New York City in 2004, operated as a video hosting platform serving millions of users and thousands of enterprise customers globally. Bending Spoons operates from Milan, Italy, and typically relocates acquired companies' operations to European locations with lower labor costs than United States technology hubs.

Why: The layoffs follow Bending Spoons' established acquisition pattern across Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, FiLMiC Pro, and other technology properties. The company's model involves acquiring underperforming software businesses, eliminating expensive workforces, relocating operations to lower-cost markets, raising subscription prices, and operating with minimal staffing to maximize profitability. The strategy reflects private equity approaches that prioritize short-term financial optimization over long-term product development.

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