Canva Cuts or Relocates 1,271 Roles as Its Manila Office Waits for Numbers

Canva will cut or relocate 1,271 roles, about 22 percent of its workforce, in the biggest restructuring in the design platform’s thirteen-year history. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins announced the changes in a note to staff published on the company newsroom on November 3.

The Canva layoffs come as growth slowed for the first time in a decade, and Perkins said incremental fixes would not be enough. “This has been our hardest year yet,” she wrote, adding that the company needs to “refound” itself around small, empowered teams rather than the layered structures it built while scaling.

What the Canva layoffs mean for Manila

Here is the part Philippine readers will look for first, and the honest answer is that the note does not provide it. Canva’s announcement spans teams in 37 countries and does not say which locations carry the heaviest impact. Manila is not mentioned anywhere in the memo.

What the company does say is that Sydney will become the primary home for more of its product teams, and that some staff are being asked to relocate to centralized hubs. That matters locally because Manila is not a small outpost. Canva opened there in 2014 as its first office outside Australia, starting with seven people, and the company now says it has over 1,000 Canvanauts in the Philippines working from a campus in Makati City.

Canva has said the conversations will follow different local requirements and processes, so timing will vary by country. As of this writing the local team has not disclosed how many Filipino employees are affected.

The three changes behind the restructuring

Canva is folding Product, Growth and Platform into a single Product Org, which it says removes handovers and gives teams clearer ownership of bigger problems. It is also reducing subspecialization, pulling narrow roles into broader ones and collapsing management layers. The third change is geographic: co-locating closely connected teams and increasing in-person collaboration.

From January, most hybrid employees are expected in the office around two to three days a week, depending on their area.

What departing staff receive

The package is unusually generous for the industry, and it is the reason the announcement drew praise rather than the usual backlash. Everyone leaving gets at least six months of salary including statutory entitlements, regardless of location. The one-year vesting cliff is being removed for recent joiners, healthcare continues for twelve months where Canva provides it, and twelve months of the company’s employee assistance program extends to family members.

Departing staff also receive career coaching, interview preparation and a year of LinkedIn Premium, plus an opt-in alumni directory Canva will share with investors and partners. Everyone leaving keeps their Canva-issued MacBook, which the company acknowledged not everyone has a personal laptop to fall back on.

A separate Canva Collective Fund offers US$10,000 grants to departing employees who want to start something of their own. Interest must be registered by December 14, and Canva takes no ownership or equity in what they build.

Affected staff receive an individual meeting with a senior leader in their area. Canva holds a company all-hands on November 10, with org-level sessions from November 11.