Nike reportedly just gutted its SNKRS team. According to sources familiar with the situation, the company laid off an estimated 90% of the teams connected to SNKRS launches and the reaction from people inside the org made it clear how significant the cut was.
A LinkedIn post from Stacy Devino, a Principal Engineer who worked on SNKRS, framed it bluntly: "The org and the people behind SNKRS were obliterated yesterday." She went on to describe the scale of what the team had built, handling traffic events where up to 100 million users were competing for as few as 5,000 pairs at once. That's a hard engineering problem, and by most accounts they solved it well.
This latest move is part of a broader wave of cuts at Nike. The company already laid off 775 employees in January and another 1,400 in April, primarily in technology and operations. The SNKRS layoffs appear to be part of that same tech reorganization under CEO Elliott Hill's "Win Now" turnaround strategy.
The bigger question now is what happens to SNKRS itself. Speculation is already circulating that Nike could lean on third-party platforms like EQL and Shopify being the names most frequently mentioned to handle future drops. Whether that means SNKRS the app goes away or simply gets rebuilt with fewer people behind it remains unclear.
For sneakerheads, the app has been the center of the launch experience for nearly a decade. A lot could change.
Nike SNKRS Layoff
SNKRS launched in 2015 and became the primary way Nike handled limited sneaker releases at scale. Also te app introduced draw-based raffles, digital queues, and location-based drops that fundamentally changed how sneaker culture interacts with product launches.
At its peak, Saturday morning drops were essentially a DDOS attack on Nike's servers with millions of users, thousands of pairs, and a countdown clock. Further, the team behind it built infrastructure that no one else in the industry had attempted at that scale.
EQL is a raffle platform that already powers drops for Jordan Brand and other Nike partners globally. Shopify handles e-commerce infrastructure for major brands. Overall either could theoretically absorb parts of what SNKRS currently does.
