No real surprise. They'll have expanded unnecessarily when bitcoin mining was immensely profitable in the previous bull run and now they're feeling the squeeze. They won't be the only company that is doing this.
Yep, they really grow during 2016-2017 so obviously they have to hire a lot of employees to cope up with the high demand during that time. But since the market went into a recession, they have to lay-off a lot of non-permanent employees to cut losses. They still have mining farms outside of China so it's another reason why they need to streamline their businesses in order to survived. Remember they have tons of BCH which is not as profitable as they think it would be.