The Biggest Layoffs of the Tech Downturn...So Far

It’s a stressful time at Tesla. The company was already under a federal investigation for crashes linked to its semi-autonomous vehicles, and then its eccentric CEO decided, seemingly out of nowhere, that we wanted to aquire Twitter. That impulse buy attempt ended up driving Tesla’s stock price down.

In the middle of all that drama, the company announced it would move to axe 200 of its 350 employees working on Autopilot, the seeming crown jewel of Tesla that Musk has said is critical to the company’s long-term growth. Tesla completely shut an entire San Mateo, California office in the process. The majority of these employees were reportedly low-wage workers working to analyze Autopilot’s massive collection of real-time driving data through data labeling and other techniques.

TikTok has emerged as one of the biggest winners of Facebook’s continuous spiral toward social media hell and has overall managed to stave off some of the biggest pains felt by the tech industry’s downturn. That doesn’t make it immune to layoffs though.

Last month, Wired cited five sources who claimed TikTok had begun laying off an unspecified amount of workers in its U.S. office. Workers in the company’s EU and U.K divisions were also reportedly told to brace for similar actions. As part of the alleged larger restructuring, TikTok reportedly put previous plans to expand some teams on hold.

In a statement sent to Wired, a TikTok spokesperson said there are some roles in the company that have “shifted in focus,” but disputed the characterization of the moves as a “company-wide restructure.”

Coinbase was one of dozens of crypto companies blindsided in recent months by the cryptocurrency collapse. Though Coinbase hasn’t had to file for bankruptcy, like other crypto firms, it has had to significantly lighten its staff load. Back in June, Coinbase laid off 18% of its total staff, around 1,100 workers, citing a looming recession, the crypto winter, and its own overly optimistic growth projections.

“Our employee costs are too high to effectively manage this uncertain market,” CEO Brian Armstrong said at the time. “The actions we are taking today will allow us to more confidently manage through this period even if it is severely prolonged.”

For several years, Netflix, the company that first cracked the television streaming code, was an unstoppable growth machine. That was, of course, before Dinsey+, HBO Max, Apple TV, Hulu, and the seemingly a trillion other “[insert old media corpse] Plus” competitors joined the field. Netflix’s subscriber count has slowed down, and its business has taken a hit. The company announced the inevitable in May, revealing it would move to cut 150 employees or roughly 1.3% of its workforce.

Things have only gotten worse since then. About a month after Netflix’s initial layoffs the company announced another set of cuts, this time impacting 300 employees, or 4% of the company’s total workforce, according to The Guardian. Now, in a desperate effort to stop the bleeding of its more than 200,000 dearly departed subscribers, Netflix is apparently considering welcoming advertising to its platform. Welcome back to the early 2000s y’all.

Twitter employees have had a rough year. The entire staff spent much of 2022 in limbo, wondering who would lead their company, only to eventually have CEO Elon Musk take over and immediately slash the company’s headcount in half. Less than two weeks after taking over the company, Musk laid off 3,750-person employees only to embarrassingly have to beg some of those same employees to return days later.

The November culling wasn’t Twitter’s first round off layoff of the year, but it was by far the most significant. In early June, the company moved to lay off around 30% of its talent acquisition team. Prior to that Twitter had hinted at the potential for rough water earlier in the year when it froze most hirings and backfills.

Twitter employees, already drained from dealing with the on again, off again, attempts by the world’s richest person to acquire the company (and tank Twitter’s stock in the process) were faced with yet another stress point last month. In early June, the company moved to lay off around 30% of its talent acquisition team. Twitter hinted at the potential for rough water earlier in the year when it froze most hirings and backfills.

Though the world’s leading online retailer, Amazon, has so far managed to weather the tech downturn relatively well, the same can’t necessarily be said for its smaller competitor, Shopify. In late July, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke announced the company would lay off 10% of its staff, roughly 1,000 workers, following a period of explosive pandemic growth.

Shopify benefited immensely from a sudden shift towards ecommercce propelled by covid lockdowns and evolving shopping patterns. Like many companies, Shopify went on a hiring spree, expecting that level of ecommerce to outlive the pandemic. That’s not exactly playing out the way Shopify expected.

“Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong,” Lütke wrote. “Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today and I’m deeply sorry for that.”

The self-described “democratized finance” app at the center of last year’s so-called meme stock frenzy has struggled to recover ever since its disastrous IPO, which Bloomberg estimated was among the worst debut for any company of its size. Now, in 2022 the company’s employees, whom executives refer to as “Robinhooders,” are feeling the pain.

In late April, CEO and founder Vlad Tenev announced the company would cut around 9% of its workforce following a period of “hyper-growth,” in 2020 and 2021. It turns out those cuts were a sign of what was to come. In the first week of August, Tenev wrote another blog post, this time announcing a much larger layoff affecting 23% of the workforce. The dramatic cuts came just hours after the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it had fined the company’s cryptocurrency division for “significant anti-money-laundering, cybersecurity, and consumer protection violations.”

Though the vast majority of Lyft’s drivers come and go, layoffs have still managed to touch the company’s corporate seats. In July, Lyft said it would lay off around 60 jobs in its rental division and will reportedly discontinue service where it offers long-term car rental, Reuters reported.

That was just the beginning though. Around four months after disbanding its rental team, Lyft made the much larger move to layoff nearly 700 of its corporate employees, or around 13% of staff.

The company’s two co-founders, ​​John Zimmer and Logan Green, sent a memo to staff confirming earlier reports by The Wall Street Journal acknowledging the layoffs. Fears over an impending recession and increasing rideshare insurance were cited among several reasons for the layoffs. The founders claimed they, “worked hard” to bring down costs over the summer but ultimately to no avail.

“The layoffs impact every organization in the company, and were based on deprioritized initiatives, an effort to reduce management layers, broader savings goals, and, in some cases, performance trajectory,” the founders wrote.

“We are not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy.”

Video hosting giant Vimeo added its name to the tech layoff dogpile in mid-July with its CEO Anjali Sud announcing the company had moved to cut 6% of its total workforce. In a blog post, Sud cited “challenging economic conditions,” that were expected for the foreseeable future as the main reason for the layoffs. The cuts came after months of slowed hiring at the company.

“While we’ve intentionally taken action across other expense areas first, it’s become clear that we also have to look at our largest area of investment, our team,” Sud wrote.

A Vimeo spokesperson reached out to Gizmodo after publication and argued the company’s name shouldn’t be included in this list, in part, because the company laid off less total employees than other larger tech firms. The spokesperson said the company is still currently hiring for roles and claimed the layoffs were intended to help the company become more “strategically sound.”

As it turns out, the July layoffs were just the beginning. In early January, 2023, Vimeo moved forward with yet another round of layoffs, this time impacting 11% of its staff. “Further deterioration in economic conditions,” and a better understanding of post-pandemic era consumer demand were cited as the primary reason for the new wave of cuts.

“We are entering 2023 with a more focused strategy to simplify Vimeo, and ultimately, our team size and composition needs to reflect that focus,” Sud said. “This reduction enables us to achieve our growth and profitability goals in a way that is far less dependent on the broader market, putting us in full control of our destiny.”

At the start of August OnlyFans, the service largely responsible for an upsurge in paid subscriptions for sexual content, said it would lay off an unspecified number of employees citing a move to “reshape certain teams,” per Insider. The layoffs came as somewhat of a surprise, considering a company executive, just weeks earlier, said the company wasn’t experiencing the type of subscriber slowdown from giants like Netflix.

The move comes after the company tried and failed last year to pivot away from sexually explicit content. That attempted move was met with criticism from OnlyFans content creators, who felt they were being burned by a company they’d played a critical role in making relevant and profitable.

Oh, Cameo. When your friend’s birthday is moments away and you still haven’t come up with a gift, where else can you go to pay for a 30-second shout-out from a D-list celebrity? Unfortunately, it seems like that business model might not have a terribly long shelf life.

Earlier this year, the company, whose lineup has at times influenced Snoop Dog, Caitlyn Jenner, and even Donald Trump Jr, announced it would lay off around a quarter of its staff. The layoffs, which CEO Steven Galanis described as a “course correction,” came after the company went on a bit of a hiring spree to meet increased demand during the pandemic. Like so many other companies on this list though, that brief pandemic era bump turned out to be short-lived.

While the biggest names in music streaming have so far managed to avoid layoffs, the same cannot be said for the smaller, but comparatively more artist-friendly platform SoundCloud. On Wednesday, according to Billboard, CEO Michael Weissman emailed staff alerting them of layoffs impacting up to 20% of the company. A rep for the company reportedly confirmed the cuts and said the company is undergoing a “significant” transformation.

“Today’s change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability,” Weissman wrote in his email to staff. “We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company, and that now extends to a reduction to our team.”

The first week of August was a doozy for Roomba developer iRobot. The robotics company struck a deal with Amazon to acquire the company for $61 per share, in a deal valued at nearly $1.7 billion, shocking both commentators and some antitrust experts. On the same day, however, the company also announced it would lay off 10% of its staff.

iRobot revealed the layoffs—which, intentionally or not, were buried under the acquisition news—during its second-quarter earnings report. iRobot said it was in the process of restructuring its operations, meaning around 140 of iRobot employees would lose their jobs. Despite the odd timing, iRobot told robotics blog The Robot Report that Amazon was not involved in the layoffs.

Following months of public financial struggles, Snap finally came forward with a bombshell. In an August 31 memo, CEO E​​van Spiegel told staff the company would cut its workforce by about 20%, or more than 1,000 workers. Spiegel cited bleak forward-looking revenue projections and said the major restructuring was necessary to “ensure Snap’s long-term success in any environment.” The company had undergone rapid expansion, nearly doubling since March 2020.

“We must now face the consequences of our lower revenue growth and adapt to the market environment,” Spiegel said.

The writing’s been on the wall for Snap. In the spring, the company said it would slow hiring after its stock plunged nearly 40% in a single day. Months later, in the company’s Q2 earnings, it recorded its weakest ever quarterly sales growth in its six years as a public company. Like other large internet companies, Snap’s suffering stems in larger part from a larger downturn in digital advertising revenues plaguing the tech industry.

In September, content creator membership platform Patreon added its name to the growing list of companies burned after over-investing during the pandemic. In a letter to staff on Tuesday, Patreon CEO and co-founder Jack Conte said the company would cut 17% of its workforce, or around 80 workers, from its Go-to-Market, Operations, Finance, and People teams. Conte said the company accelerated its operations during the pandemic, due in part to the rising number of people turning to online content creation amid lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, and set up a new operating plan to support that growth. Though some analysts predicted that the boom would sustain itself post-pandemic, the opposite has happened.

“As the world began recovering from the pandemic and enduring a broader economic slowdown, that plan is no longer the right path forward for Patreon,” Conte said. “I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the changes today, which will be very difficult for our team.”

In addition to the layoffs, Conte said Patreon will consolidate its marketing team, restructure its Creator Partnerships efforts, and reduce the size of its operations and recruiting functions. The layoff news came less than one week after the company laid off five employees in its security team. One of the laid-off workers claimed those layoffs represented the entirety of the security team, though Patreon objected to that description in a statement sent to Gizmodo.

Talk about a turn of the tides. Peloton, the flashy home fitness darling that blossomed during the pandemic, is now fighting for survival. In its fourth round of layoffs this year, Peloton on Thursday told The Wall Street Journal it would cut around 500 employees or 12% of its workforce. Peloton said this round of layoffs represents the final move in its larger restructuring plan. The cuts, according to a memo to staff from CEO Barry McCarthy seen by CNN, were necessary to “save Peloton.” McCarthy told the journal he’s giving the company six months to turn the ship around. If that fails, McCarthy said Peloton might not be able to continue as a stand-alone company.

The most recent layoffs touched multiple areas of the company but will reportedly be felt the most in the company’s marketing department. Once the layoffs are complete Peloton, will have around 3,800 employees worldwide, That’s less than half the total staff it employed during the same period last year.

Peloton, like other companies listed here, made massive investments during the pandemic on the backs of explosive growth. Wavering demand, supply chain shocks, and changing late pandemic consumer behavior, however, have exposed the short-sightedness of those efforts.

Declining digital ad revenues and a shaky economic horizon forced major news aggregator Flipboard to cut nearly a quarter of its entire staff last week. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue confirmed the layoffs in recent Axios report. The layoff effect 24 workers, which amounts to 21% of Flipboard’s workforce.

“Yes, we restructured due to the bad economy and tough outlook for the digital ad business,” McCue told Axios. Flipboard launched 12 years ago with the vision of becoming the, “one place to find the stories for your day,” amid a growing cacophony of options exploding during the early mobile economy.

Much has changed since 2010 though. On the curation side, Big Tech backed aggregators like Google and Apple News have come to dominate the space and threaten smaller services like Flipboard. The wavering digital advertising space also continues to take a toll on a wide swath of tech firms including Meta and Snap. In the latter case, declining digital advertising revenues forced Snap to lay off 1,000 of its staff.

Even Microsoft can’t avoid tech layoffs. On Monday, October 18, the company reportedly moved to cut less than 1,000 employees spread out across multiple divisions of its business and various regions according to an Axios report. That was just the beginning though. Three months later, the company fully removed the bandaid and cut around 10,000 employees.

For now, specific details explaining the reason for the cuts remain sparse. The layoffs come three months after Microsoft reportedly moved to cut other jobs impacting around 1% of their company as part of a broader “strategic realignment.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment but told Axios it plans to continue investing in its business. Microsoft did not deny the layoffs occurred.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis, and make structural adjustments accordingly.” a spokesperson said following the first round of layoffs. “We will continue to invest in our business and hire in key growth areas in the year ahead.”

CEO Satya Nadella announced the second, much larger round of layoffs in January as part of a larger pivot to refocus the company towards AI and other more immediate business priorities. Outside of those priorities, over hiring and a potential looming recession also played a factor.

“I’m confident that Microsoft will emerge from this stronger and more competitive, but it requires us to take actions grounded in three priorities,” Nadella wrote in a note to staff. 

Still, Microsoft’s cuts come as somewhat of a shock. While other tech giants like Meta and Google have telegraphed potential cuts for months and even encouraged their own under performing employees to walk out the door, Microsoft remained relatively quiet on the issue. On paper, Microsoft wasn’t as susceptible to the effects of a worsening digital advertising market, and it appeared, at least, that it hadn’t over-extended itself with unusual investments and mad hiring during the pandemic like some other firms.

The online real estate and marketing giant Zillow reportedly laid off around 300 of its staff on October 26 according to a TechCrunch report. The layoffs came just around a year after the company issued a substantially larger layoff affecting around 2,000 employees, or around a quarter of its staff, in November 2021.

Sources speaking with TechCrunch said the October 2022 layoffs primarily impacted staff on the Zillow’s Offer advisors, PA sales and back-end staff at Zillow Home Loans and Zillow Closing Services. A Zillow spokesperson confirmed the layoffs in an email to Gizmodo.

“As part of our normal business process, we continuously evaluate and responsibly manage our resources as we create digital solutions to make it easier for people to move. This week, we’ve made the difficult—but necessary—decision to eliminate a small number of roles and will shift those resources to key growth areas around our housing super-app,” the spokesperson said. “We’re still hiring in key technology-related roles across the company.”

Stripe, one of the Fintech industry’s biggest success stories, moved to lay off more than 1,000 employees, or around 14% of the company, in early November.

CEO Patrick Collison broke the news to his workers via a memo on November 3 where he, like many others before him, blamed economic conditions, inflation, and rising interest rates, for contributing to an untenable business environment. Collison described the cuts as, “the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date.”

Stripe, which helps process credit card payments, had a front row seat to the e-commerce boom ushered in by the covid-19 pandemic. As a result, the company’s growth skyrocketed, with both payments and revenue growing by three fold. That temporary pandemic high wouldn’t last though, and now Stripe’s reeling from the come down.

“We have always taken pride in being a capital efficient business and we think this attribute is important to preserve,” Collison wrote. “To adapt ourselves appropriately for the world we’re headed into, we need to reduce our costs.”

Collier went on to admit several errors of judgment by the company’s founders. First, they were simply too optimistic about the internet economy’s 2022 growth. Related to that, Collier said the founders grew the company’s operating costs too quickly.

“We are going to correct these mistakes,” Collier wrote. “The world is hard to predict right now, but we expect that these changes will set us up for robust cash flow generation in the quarters ahead.”

Any thoughts Meta might make through the 2022 layoff scourge intact evaporated on November 9. Following months of hints, Meta finally revealed it would lay off a staggering 11,000 employees, or around 13% of tis workforce, in the first major mass layoff in the company’s history. The layoffs were the result of stagnating user growth and an over eager pivot to “the metaverse,” and saw its stock lose 70% of its value this year.

“Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

The layoffs came months after Meta announced a company-wide hiring freeze. Zuckerberg dropped the hiring freeze news, according to Bloomberg, during a company wide Q&A with staff. In addition to the hiring freeze, Zuckerberg said teams should expect budget cuts, even amongst those still growing. The CEO reportedly told staff to expect less overall staff at the company next year. Overall, Bloomberg notes, the belt-tightening amounts to the first major budget cuts in Meta’s 18-year history.

The budget cuts don’t come as a surprise. Back in July the company, which just burned $10 billion on a metaverse that doesn’t exist, said it would slash hiring of new engineers by around 30%. Around that same time, a senior executive sent out an email to managers telling them to “move to exit,” poor-performing employees. And while layoffs haven’t happened yet, Zuckerberg’s signaled they are a possibility and even tried to encourage some lower-performing employees to do the dirty work for him.

“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is okay with me,” Zuckerberg said in a leaked Q&A. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”

Amazon, the country’s second largest employees, began slowly rolling out layoffs impacting 10,000 employees at the end of 2022. Those layoff started with teams working on the company’s Alexa smart home and Luna cloud gaming segments but evolved to eventually effect 18,000 workers spread out across the company by early January, 2023.

Jassy revealed the mass layoff news in an email to employees shared online titled, “Update from CEO Andy Jassy on role eliminations.” In it, Jassy said he decided to make the additional cuts after meeting with leaders in the company to discuss ways to reduce costs amid a shaky economy and prioritize, “what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses.” The cuts touch several business segments, though Jassy says the majority of the downturn will impact the company’s Stores and PXT organizations.

“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Jassy said. “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure; however, I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles.”

In a strange move unique to Amazon, the company reportedly sent a letter to employees back in November offering a “voluntary severance” buyout program if they agreed to leave the company willingly. Employees who agreed to the voluntary severance would receive receive health insurance benefits through the end of December and a weekly stipend over 12 weeks.

Arguably no single company benefited as directly from the pandemic economy as mega retailer Amazon. The company went on a vast hiring spree in 2020 and in the years since has spent at least $5.6 billion acquiring MGM Studios and iRobot. In early October, however, the company showed signs of a slowdown. In an announcement first reported by The New York Times, Amazon said it’s implementing a hiring freeze in its retail business. The company reportedly told its recruiters to close open job positions and cancel a number of recruiting activities. Amazon’s hiring freeze will reportedly stay in effect for the remainder of 2022.

Amazon went on to expand that hiring freeze to all corporate employees in early November. In a memo, Amazon Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti cited an uncertain economic outlook and a rise in hiring in recent years as the main drivers behind the slowdown.

“This is not the first time that we’ve faced uncertain and challenging economies in our past,” Galetti wrote. “While we have had several years where we’ve expanded our headcount broadly, there have also been several years where we’ve tightened our belt and were more streamlined in how many people we add.”

Despite the hiring freeze, the memo ended on a seemingly optimistic note. Galetti said they still plan to hire a “meaningful number” of people in 2023. But with the additional cuts announced in the first week of 2023, it’s unclear how that optimism will inevitably play out.

Softbank and Google backed autonomous vehicle startup Nuro wasn’t able to escape 2022 without hitting a major speedbump. On November 18, the company co-founders Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson sent an email to their staff alerting them of layoffs impacting 20% of its staff , or around 300 people. In their email, the founders said they overestimated the extent to which positive economic growth conditions and investment in 2021 would continue long term. The founders said they mistakenly doubled the size of their team in less than two years and “significantly increased our operating expenses.”

The layoffs, according to Zhu and Ferguson, extends Nuro’s runway out to 2025 and will allow them the flexibility to weather any potential future economic downturn.

“With our newly extended 2025 runway we now have the resources—and renewed focus—to scale an incredible, efficient service for our partners, and be less distracted by noise in the market. And we’ll share more on this soon,” the founders wrote.

Streaming platform and device maker Roku joined many of its fellow competitors by announcing a round of layoff impacting around 7% of its staff. On November 17, in a statement seen by Variety, the company revealed it would cut 200 jobs. The jobs cuts, according to the statement, are the result, broadly, of “current economic conditions.”

“These actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position,” the statement reads.

The results came on the heels of third quarter earrings that surpasses experts’ estimates. At the same time, Roku said slowed digital ad spending and rising inflation would negatively impact their fourth quarter.

While many tech companies have so far opted to respond to worsening economic outlooks with a “rip the band-aid off” mass layoff approach, legacy brand HP went a slightly different route. In late November, following a worse than expected third quarter, HP released a statement saying they would move to layoff somewhere around 4,000 to 6,000 jobs but noted they would do so over the course of the next three years. The announcement came after earnings where HP sales dipped down more than 11% year over year.

“The company expects to reduce gross global headcount by approximately 4,000-6,000 employees,” the company said. According to that same document, HP says the layoffs and additional cost cutting efforts will result in annualized gross run rate savings of at least $1.4 billion by the end of 2025.

Food delivery giant DoorDash was among some of the biggest winners of the early pandemic era where troves of new customers turned to the app amid lockdown orders. Like Amazon and others before it, DoorDash responded to that new demand with a wave of hiring. Now, however, DoorDash is reeling from a post lockdown comedown. On November 30, CEO Tony Xu released a statement saying the company would reduce its corporate headcount by 1,250 employees. That comes out to around 6% of the company’s total corporate staff.

“Most of our investments are paying off, and while we’ve always been disciplined in how we have managed our business and operational metrics, we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth,” Xu said.

The CEO went on to cite growing inflation and other economic concerns as additional reasons for making the cuts.

“Our business has been more resilient than other ecommerce companies, but we too are not immune to the external challenges and growth has tapered vs our pandemic growth rates,” Xu added. “While our business continues to grow fast, given how quickly we hired, our operating expenses—if left unabated—would continue to outgrow our revenue.”

The speed bump follows years of growth at DoorDash that kicked off prior to the pandemic. Since 2019, the company has beefed up its operations, largely through acquisition of major services like Caviar, Chowbotics, and Wolt Enterprises.

Welp, that didn’t last long. Less than six months after California-based crypto exchange Kraken bucked industry trends by announcing its intention to hire 500 employees it went the exact opposite direction and said it would instead cut around 1,000 positions. The company’s CEO, Jesse Powell, announced the expected 1,100 layoffs (around 30% of the company) via a blog post in late November.

Powell said Kraken, like every other crypto firm, was slimming down in an effort to cut costs among one of the worse crypto downturns in recent memory. Kraken, according to the CEO, more than tripled its headcount in recent years to adapt to a massive influx of traders jumping on the crypto bandwagon.

“Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets,” Powell said. “This resulted in significantly lower trading volumes and fewer client sign-ups. We responded by slowing hiring efforts and avoiding large marketing commitments. Unfortunately, negative influences on the financial markets have continued and we have exhausted preferable options for bringing costs in line with demand.”

Airtable, a glitzy collaborative workflow platform used by organizations, including many newsrooms, announced it would layoff around 20% of its staff, including several key leadership roles. Specifically, according to TechCrunch, the layoffs will impact 254 employees spread out across the company’s business development and engineering teams, amongst others. The company’s chief revenue officer, chief people officer, and chief product officer also reportedly left the company.

“We’ve rapidly expanded and executed on multiple fronts,” CEO Howie Liu said in an email seen by TechCrunch. “At the time, I believed we could successfully pursue all of them in parallel. “However, in taking a hard look at our efforts in the current market environment, we’ve identified the teams best positioned to capture the opportunity in enterprise in order to bring complete focus, alignment and accountability in our execution.”

There’s never a great time for layoffs but Airtable’s round of cuts comes at a particularly embarrassing moment. Just days prior to the layoff decision, the company published a blog post about how laid off tech workers could utilize Airtable’s software to help them find new jobs.

“It’s nice to know that it [an Airtable list of jobs] is useful and that it might actually help somebody land the job they’re looking for,” Inventables Senior Manager Brianna Doe said in the post. “It’s really hard to see so many people getting laid off.”

Although rumors of impending layoffs impacting business software titan Salesforce had circulated for months, CEO Marc Benioff made an official announcement revealing cuts impacting 10% of the company’s staff in a letter to employees dated January 4, 2023. By the day’s end, around 8,000 employees were left without a job.

The reason given for the cuts mirrored that of many other struggling tech firms. Salesforce, like some of its peers, overextended itself and over-hired amid a temporary pandemic-era boom in remote work productivity. At the time of writing, Salesforce staff numbered around 80,000. That’s nearly double the 48,000 workers it had prior to the pandemic.

“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff wrote.

Saleforce’s clients, Benioff added, were, “taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions,” amid an uncertain economic outlook.

Google, a company long known for its commitment to retaining its workforce, announced it would cut 12,000 jobs, the largest layoff in its 25 year history. Though it managed to stave off layoffs longer than most of its big tech peers, the company finally succumbed to the tightening mark pressure in early January. The cuts represent around 6% of Google’s total workforce.

In an email to staff, CEO Sundar Pichai said the layoffs were partly a response to over-eager hiring in recent years. Google reportedly increased its headcount by 24% from 2021 to 2022 to match its dramatic growth. That growth slowed down last year though, leading the company to undergo a “rigorous review” to ensure the company’s workforce was aligned with its high-level priorities. Pichai made a point to emphasize the company’s commitment to AI, likely in response to flurry of media reports and internal conversations at the company concerning OpenAI’s potential threat to Google search.

It’s a trying time at Google. The layoffs arrived just weeks before the Department Of Justice issued its second antitrust lawsuit against the company, their time over its monopoly on the ad tech space. Between restructuring, regulators, and relentless competition, Google faces one of the toughest moments in its history.

Spotify managed to escape the outpouring of 2022 tech layoffs only to eventually succumb and cut 6% of its workforce, or nearly 600 employees, in late January. In a memo sent to staff, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said the organizational changes were made, “in an effort to drive more efficiency, control costs, and speed up decision-making.”

Ek told his employees as late as last June that he didn’t expect any layoffs on the horizon. While most of its competitors struggled through 2022 due to a decline in digital advertising spend, Ek believes Spotify’s massive global scale could help it weather the storm. Spotify implemented cost savings and slowed hiring, but none of that was ultimately enough to alleviate the financial pressure.

“While it is clear this path is the right one for Spotify, it doesn’t make it any easier—especially as we think about the many contributions these colleagues have made,” Ek said.

Even the tech industry’ longest living legacy brands haven’t been able to escape the recent tech downturn unscathed. IBM, founded in 1911, announced layoffs impacting 3,900 employees or around 1.5% of its global workforce in January.

The New York based tech giant tried to distance its flavoring of layoffs away from others, arguing its cuts were related to the recent spinoff and sale of two of its businesses, Kyndryl and Watson Health. James Kavanaugh, IBM’s CFO, told Reuters the firm is, “committed to hiring for client-facing research and development,” despite the cuts.

Voice AI company SoundHound sent nearly half of its staff for a chaotic ride in January. The company, which produces AI products for household names ranging from Mercedes-Benz to Snap, silently laid off more than 40% of its workforce, offering them a measly two week severance package condition up SoundHound securing new fundings according to an exclusive Gizmodo report. Laid off SoundHound employees speaking with Gizmodo spoke out against the “pitiful” severance and expressed frustration with the 17-year-old- company’s handling of its restructuring.

“I’m actually quite shocked by the way the layoffs were handled,” one of the laid off employees told Gizmodo. “I was expecting a 17 year old company, which is now a public company, to at least provide bare minimum severance.”

Luckily for those workers, SoundHound was able to secure the necessary funding, a total of $25 million in equity, from a mix of investors weeks later. Several Of the laid off employees showed Gizmodo emails they received from the company confirming they would in fact receive their severance following the new investment.

A massive dip in digital advertising spend in 2022 has finally caught up to Yahoo. The legacy tech company which paved the way for countless other in the digital advertising space announced it would cut 1,000 workers in February. By the years end, the company said it will end uo cutting 20% of its total workforce and more than half of its ad tech team, according to Axios

“These changes announced today are entirely within the context of creating a better business plan for that division going forward,” Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said in a recent interview “The company has taken many bites of the apple here in trying to make it work over the years, but as a standalone company we had to take a very honest view in how we apply our resources.”

The cuts will reportedly bring about an end to the “supply-side platform” aspect of Yahoo’s ad business, which helped advertisers sell ads against their content. Yahoo’s native advertising platform, called Gemini, will also reportedly be put to rest.

Once a major competitor in the battle for digital advertising market share, Yahoo in recent years has largely been cut out but the Google, Meta, Amazon advertising tripoly, In 2021, those three companies reportedly accounted for nearly 87% of U.S. digital advertising revues, according to an Insider Intelligence forecast. 

Zoom, one of the greatest tech success stories of the pandemic, is getting a reality check. In February, roughly three years after much of the world began using “zoom” as a verb, the video meeting platform announced major layoffs impacting around 15% of its workforce. That works out to around 1,300 employees.

In a note to staff, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said it failed to properly assess the sustainability of its early pandemic growth.

“As the world transitions to life post-pandemic, we are seeing that people and businesses continue to rely on Zoom,” Yuan said. “But the uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard—yet important—look inward to reset ourselves so we can weather the economic environment, deliver for our customers and achieve Zoom’s long-term vision.”

The ripple effects of Microsoft’s massive restructuring efforts are impacting Github. The company, acquired by Microsoft back in 2018, said in February it would reduce its overall staff by 10% by the end of the fiscal year. Employees aren’t the only ones on the chopping block though. Github, according to Fortune, will also close all of its offices and end its current leases.

“We announced a number of difficult but necessary decisions and budgetary realignments to both protect the health of our business in the short term and grant us the capacity to invest in our long-term strategy moving forward,” a company spokesperson said in a statement sent to TechCrunch. “You can view our CEO’s full message to employees with additional details on these changes below.”

As part of the shakeup, Github will also reportedly move to Teams for its internal video conferencing and move its laptop refresh cycle from three to four years. All, apparently, in the name of saving money.