The technology industry is continuing to lay off thousands of employees, and is approaching 150,000 employees lost in the first three months of 2023.
The e-commerce and streaming giant Amazon announced layoffs of 9,000 employees on Monday. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced 10,000 job cuts a week earlier, on March 14.
As of Tuesday, 505 companies across the tech industry had cut 148,180 employees from their payroll in 2023, according to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi. Of U.S. tech companies, 324 accounted for 109,366 job losses.
Around this time last month, total tech industry layoffs for 2023 had hit 109,000 jobs, including 84,262 across about 250 companies in the United States.
At the current pace, tech industry job losses in 2023 are set to soon surpass the 160,997 jobs the industry lost in 2022. If the trends continue, tech industry job losses in 2023 could surpass the losses in 2022 by around 300 percent.
It remains to be seen if the trend of job losses will continue or if the situation will stabilize.
As he announced the staff cuts at Dell last month, Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said “market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future” and the steps the company had taken to that point to stay ahead of the downturn were “no longer enough.”
After buying out Twitter last year, Elon Musk went on to lay off about half of Twitter’s workforce. In a Twitter post on Feb. 5, Musk wrote that he had saved the social media platform from bankruptcy and that the company is “now trending to breakeven if we keep at it.” By Feb. 25, Twitter reportedly initiated another round of layoffs, with plans to cut at least 200 more employees.
The widespread tech industry layoffs could be the result of a correction after pandemic-era over-hiring. Online commerce saw a spike in 2020, as many Americans were confined to their homes. Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff has attributed his company’s recent job losses to over-hiring, as has Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
By Ryan Morgan
