Amazon was the most recent tech behemoth to announce it’s cutting its workforce.
Just three months into 2023, the number of tech layoffs is already pretty close to surpassing 2022′s total figure.
To date, about 148,000 workers have been laid off, compared with a little more than 161,000 workers who were let go over the entirety of 2022, according to data collected by Layoffs.fyi.
The number of layoffs in 2023 is especially striking in comparison to the previous few years; more people were laid off last year than in 2020 and 2021 combined. This contraction puts total layoffs at the highest since the dot com bust in the early aughts.
Amazon was the most recent tech behemoth to announce layoffs — saying in a message from Chief Executive Andy Jassy it will let 9,000 employees go by the end of April. That’s in addition to the 8,000 jobs the company cut this past January (and 10,000 cut last November).
Amazon isn’t the only one. Companies from Google to Meta to Microsoft are cutting their workforces just this year.
Why is this happening? A combination of factors, Grid’s Domestic Economics Reporter Matthew Zeitlin reported earlier this year: higher interest rates, falling stock prices, investor pressure and declining ad revenue, to name a few.
With the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low at the start of the covid pandemic, many tech companies grew rapidly, as much as doubling their head counts, in what NPR called an “industry-wide hiring spree.”
Meta, for instance, employed 87,000 full-time workers at its peak last year, the New York Times reported. But now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is humming a different tune, having called this year’s management theme the “year of efficiency” — a term no employee wants to hear since that usually translates to fewer employees. (Since November, Meta has laid off 21,000 employees, which is no small fraction of its workforce.)
The more innovative projects at these companies haven’t been immune to the industrywide contraction. Meta cut from Reality Labs, working on bringing about the Metaverse. Microsoft cut from its HoloLens mixed reality team. Amazon’s recent layoffs have even come to its robotics and drone delivery divisions.
This time around, some of Amazon’s more profitable divisions, including the company’s cloud computing business and advertising operations, will be impacted, the New York Times reported, though management said it hasn’t figured out exactly who will go. (That announcement, the outlet said, will likely come next month.)
Of course, Axios reported, that doesn’t mean those companies’ projects are necessarily done for. Instead, Alex Fitzpatrick wrote for the outlet last month, companies are “doubling down on proven projects, or those they view as surer short-term bets.”
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.