In an e-mail message sent to employees on Thursday, the chief executive of Digg, the user-driven social news Web site, announced that the company planned to cut its staff by 10 percent.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Digg has been struggling to grow over the past several years as social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have taken a large majority of the online link-sharing space.

This isn’t the first bad news out of the company this year. Kevin Rose, Digg’s original founder, took over the company as chief executive last month after a shake-up that resulted in the exodus of Jay Adelson, who had been chief executive for several years.

Mr. Rose sent the following message to employees early Thursday morning, which was later posted on the company’s blog:

Hey everyone, This morning we faced the difficult task of reducing our team by about 10%. This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved. Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support. I hope all of you will join me in the effort to assist all of those affected, be it as a reference or a referring source and most importantly, as a friend. This is one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make recently but we strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company. In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts. In fact, we are still hiring for these teams as they are critical in getting us to where we need to be for the future, for our impending upcoming redesign and much beyond. The only way for us to truly succeed is to adapt and adjust as necessary. I’m sure there will be many follow- up questions to this email. So, we’ll be holding an all hands today at 3pm where you can ask questions and share your comments. Thanks, Kevin

As I’ve reported in a previous article, venture capital investors have shown frustration with Digg, because of the lack of return on the $40 million already invested in the company.

It is not clear how these layoffs will affect Digg’s goals moving forward, or its plans to expand over the coming year.

Mr. Rose said in a previous blog post that employees have “been super busy on the product side” getting ready for a long-awaited Digg redesign and the release of a mobile application for both the iPhone and Android mobile platforms.