January so far has seen over 20,000 being laid off from 85 tech companies. According to the website Layoffs.fyi, that's most since March, when almost 38,000 people in the industry were shown the exits.
SAP this week said it will let go of 8,000 employees and Microsoft removed 1,900 positions in its gaming division. Fintech startup Brex laid off 20% of its staff and eBay slashed 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its full-time workforce. Salesforce laid off about 700 employees, or roughly 1% of its global workforce.
Closer home, Flipkart is working on an exercise that could see a reduction in its team size by 5-7 percent. Zomato-backed Curefit fired about 120 employees as part of a restructuring exercise. Swiggy is also expected to hand over pink slips to employees ahead of its planned IPO.
Earlier in the month, Google confirmed that it cut several hundred jobs across the company, and Amazon has eliminated hundreds of positions spanning its Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions.
Unity said it’s cutting about 25% of its staff, and Discord, which offers a popular messaging service used by gamers, is shedding 17% of its workforce.
Video game developer Riot Games, which is behind the popular “League of Legends" multiplayer battle game, trimmed 11% of its staff. The company, which is owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent, said 530 jobs were being eliminated.
The layoffs come ahead of a barrage of tech earnings next week, when Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all scheduled to report quarterly results.
Layoffs peaked in January of last year, when 277 technology companies cut almost 90,000 jobs, as the tech industry was forced to reckon with the end of a more than decade-long bull market. Most of the rightsizing efforts took place in the first quarter of 2023, declined through September, before ticking up toward the end of the year.
At Meta, in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s words, 2023 was the “year of efficiency.”