It feels like every day, we hear news of mass layoffs and hiring freezes from big tech companies that were formerly famous for having deep pockets and near-endless amenities for workers. Now, it’s clear that the industry as a whole is tightening its belt, leaving hundreds of thousands of employees out of work — and more wondering if they’ll have a job within the next few months or searching for jobs in an industry that no longer has a spot for them. It’s gotten to the point where one tech recruiting site created an interactive tool to track the layoffs across established companies and startups.
The tech industry’s moment of reckoning: layoffs and hiring freezes
The tech industry’s moment of reckoning: layoffs and hiring freezes
It’s impossible to blame the wave of large-scale layoffs on any one factor. Twitter’s layoffs happened because Elon Musk bought the company and took it private, and Meta’s CEO claims its 13 percent reduction in staff is a course correction after the company went on a hiring spree during the online retail boom that came out of the pandemic. Companies that rely on advertising, like Meta and Snap, have also been hit hard by privacy policy changes from Apple.
Meanwhile, the iPhone maker is blaming the economy for its own hiring slowdown, despite being one of the few companies still announcing record-breaking earnings and beating estimates.
To open 2023, Amazon announced its layoffs of mostly corporate employees will trim 18,000 workers from the roster, the biggest reduction — in raw numbers, despite Amazon’s 1.5 million-strong workforce — yet.
We’ll probably see even more reasons for layoffs or freezes as other companies announce their own. Stay tuned to this page for the latest on big tech companies’ cost-cutting measures and how they affect current and former employees.
Here’s all our coverage of the recent outbreak of layoffs from big tech, auto, crypto, and more:
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Jan 18, 2023, 2:24 PM UTCTom Warren
Microsoft announces big layoffs that will affect 10,000 employees
Microsoft is cutting thousands of jobs just as CEO Satya Nadella warns of a challenging two years ahead for tech companies.
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External Link DirecTV is reportedly laying off hundreds of workers.“Most” of the people affected will be managers, according to Deadline, though apparently the company classifies around half of its employees with that title. In a statement to Deadline, DirecTV said it was “adjusting [its] operations costs” because less people are paying for TV and shows are getting more expensive to secure and distribute.
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Jan 11, 2023, 9:55 PM UTCJay Peters
Verily, Alphabet’s health-focused company, is cutting jobs
The cuts, which reportedly affect more than 200 employees, mark the first for an Alphabet-owned company amid the many recent tech layoffs.
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Jan 11, 2023, 6:57 PM UTCAlice Newcome-Beill
Meta confirms it’s rescinded some full-time job offers
This is the first time the social media giant has withdrawn signed, full-time offers from potential employees and follows its first mass layoffs last fall.
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Jan 11, 2023, 1:43 AM UTCJay Peters
Esports and lifestyle brand 100 Thieves is laying off staff
100 Thieves has become one of the most recognizable brands in esports, but it’s reportedly laying off around 30 workers.
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The Verge Amazon confirms it’s laying off 18,000 workers.Following a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is notifying employees that the company’s ongoing layoffs will affect 18,000 workers.
It’s the first time we’ve gotten a concrete number from Amazon since The New York Times reported in November that the company planned on cutting 10,000 jobs.
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Jan 5, 2023, 1:25 AM UTCMitchell Clark
Amazon confirms its layoffs will affect 18,000 employees
In November 2022, The New York Times reported that Amazon planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, but that figure has grown.
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Jan 4, 2023, 4:33 PM UTCMia Sato
Vimeo is laying off 11 percent of its workforce in another round of job cuts
In an email sent to Vimeo workers and posted online, CEO Anjali Sud said ‘ongoing cost discipline’ was necessary to keep the company sustainable.
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RApple’s market cap is down $1 trillion from its peak exactly one year ago.
On January 3rd, 2022, the value of Apple’s shares briefly crossed $3 trillion.
Today, on January 3rd, 2023, the value of $AAPL shares fell to 125.07 at the market’s close, a 52-week low that sets its market cap at a frankly piddling $1.99 trillion. Now analysts are predicting a slight decline in revenue when Apple releases its latest quarterly earnings report in a few weeks.
The share price is down amid greater economic and interest rate concerns (see, it’s not just Tesla and crypto taking a beating), as well as gloomy news about both iPhone production and demand.
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External Link Micron will cut 10 percent of its workforce next year.The chipmaker announced the plan as part of its earnings report on Wednesday, saying the reduction would come from “a combination of voluntary attrition” and layoffs throughout 2023. The company also won’t be doing bonuses next year and says that executive salaries will be cut too.
Micron recently reported it has 48,000 employees, according to CNBC, meaning around 4,800 positions could be affected.
Like Intel, which has planned its own layoffs, Micron is investing billions in building new US fabs.
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External Link Some ex-Meta employees say they’re not getting full severance.A group of former Meta employees say they’re only receiving eight weeks of base pay and three months of COBRA as severance — half of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised when the mass-layoffs were announced, according to CNBC.
The full-time, non-contract workers, who were in a Meta apprenticeship program, say the company hasn’t responded to their questions with an answer on whether the discrepancy is intentional.
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External Link GameStop is reportedly cutting more jobs.Axios reports GameStop has begun another round of layoffs. The scale of the layoff is unclear, but Axios says the blockchain team was “heavily impacted.” In an email to employees obtained by Kotaku, CEO Matt Furlong said the decision to lay off staff was due in part to high inflation and “weakened consumer confidence.”
The company, which gained a lot of notoriety as a meme stock, laid off staff and fired its CFO in July.
GameStop begins layoff[Axios]
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Nov 30, 2022, 5:39 PM UTCEmma Roth
Kraken crypto exchange lays off 30 percent of workforce
The news of Kraken’s layoffs comes just months after CEO Jesse Powell went on a hiring spree for employees who would comply with his ‘crypto-first’ culture, which involves not telling people that what they said was racist.
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Nov 30, 2022, 2:14 PM UTCEmma Roth
DoorDash announces layoffs affecting 1,250 workers
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu says the company hired too quickly during the covid pandemic and that its operating costs could ‘outgrow’ its revenue.
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External Link Job cuts are coming to a Silicon Valley original.HP, one of the world’s largest PC vendors, according to data from Gartner, announced in an earnings report that it’ll lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees by the end of 2025. According to numbers cited by CNBC, that’s between seven and 11 percent of its workforce.
This is just the latest in a series of large tech layoffs, not to mention that the PC market has also had an especially rough year following a pandemic boom.
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External Link Alexa isn’t pulling its weight.Internal documents obtained by Insider indicate that Amazon’s Alexa division made up the “vast majority” of the over $3 billion that the company lost across its “Worldwide Digital” department, which includes Alexa, Echo devices, Prime Video, and other products.
Amazon confirmed layoffs affecting thousands of employees on its hardware and services teams last week, and the company’s CEO says to expect even more job cuts next year.
Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa.[Business Insider]
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Nov 18, 2022, 7:46 PM UTCAndrew J. Hawkins
Robot delivery startup Nuro is laying off 20 percent of its workers
The company, which was founded by two engineers from the Google self-driving car project, said in a note to staff that it hired too quickly in 2021.
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Nov 17, 2022, 10:32 PM UTCJay Peters
Amazon’s CEO says more layoffs will happen in 2023
The company hasn’t decided how many more jobs it’ll cut, but workers could be left wondering about their jobs for months.
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Nov 17, 2022, 9:57 PM UTCMitchell Clark
Roku lays off 200 US employees
Entertainment, tech, and advertising companies are cutting back — Roku’s all three in one.
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Nov 17, 2022, 1:02 AM UTCJay Peters
Steve Aoki dropped the beat at Amazon during layoffs
And the whole thing was livestreamed on Twitch.
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External Link Amazon employees are still waiting to hear if they’ll keep their jobs.Were you expecting Amazon to simply announce its expected 10,000 layoffs? Recode writes that the company’s swinging the ax quietly instead — quietly enough that many don’t know what’s going on. Meanwhile, “large swaths of the company’s HR division” are receiving voluntary buyout offers.
More at Recode:
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Nov 16, 2022, 4:54 PM UTCJay Peters
Amazon confirms cuts to hardware and services teams
Amazon’s SVP of devices and services informed employees on Wednesday that it will be cutting jobs from the division.
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External Link The Amazon layoffs have started.After reports that Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 workers this week, CNBC and The Washington Post are reporting that some workers there are being informed they will need to find another job with the company soon or accept a severance payment. Neither outlet mentioned how many people were affected today, and so far there haven’t been any companywide notifications.
From the Post:
Amazon employees were called into meetings with their managers across the country Tuesday, and many were told they had two months to find another job internally or accept severance payment.
Amazon starts widespread layoffs in corporate ranks[Washington Post]
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External Link Ask A Manager has weighed in.A nervous Twitter employee, whose boss and coworkers are now gone, has written to the popular work advice column Ask A Manager, asking how the heck they should handle their company’s whole…situation.
Columnist Alison Green’s advice: Stick it out, if you can. “Staying at least gives you the option of severance down the road…and gives you an ongoing income and health insurance,” Green wrote. She added, “I’m sorry something you helped build is being needlessly destroyed.”
I work at Twitter … what do I do?[Ask a Manager]
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SThe Tech Winter, visualized.
The mass layoffs at Twitter, Meta, and soon possibly Amazon are just the tip of the iceberg.
Tech job marketplace TrueUp.io has been keeping track — and it says over 183,000 people have already been hit by tech layoffs so far in 2022. You can see the details in the company’s interactive tracker here.
Dataviz: TrueUp.io/layoffs