COVID-19 impact | Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

Dropbox stated that the move will help the firm focus on its top priorities for the year, including evolving the core Dropbox experience, investing in new products, and driving operational excellence.

Moneycontrol News

January 13, 2021 / 09:43 PM IST

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. ((PC- Getty Images via AFP/Matt Winkelmeyer)

Dropbox, the online backup and storage service company, on January 13 announced it was cutting its global workforce by about 11 percent, owing to the financial crisis posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company said that the new move will affect 315 people, who will be notified by the end of the business day, the firm said in an 8K filing.

"The steps we’re taking today are painful but necessary,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said in an employee memo. "Last spring I made a commitment to all of you to preserve job security through 2020, and it was important to me that we honored that promise. But looking ahead at 2021 and beyond, it’s clear that we need to make changes in order to create a healthy and thriving business for the future," Houston said.

Tech stars quit Silicon Valley as politics, pandemic weigh

Dropbox said the move will help the firm focus on its top priorities for the year, including evolving the core Dropbox experience, investing in new products, and driving operational excellence.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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