The winter of layoffs is here. Large-scale layoffs have taken place across the world, as the US is staring at an impending recession.
Big Tech companies like Meta, Twitter, Netflix, Microsoft, Snap, and others have downsized their workforce by thousands. According to a report, this season’s layoffs have surpassed the job losses that were witnessed during the Great Recession of 2008.
In 2008, tech companies laid off about 65,000 employees, and a similar number of workers lost their livelihoods in 2009, according to data by global outplacement & career transitioning firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In comparison, 965 tech companies have laid off more than 150,000 employees this year globally, surpassing the Great Recession levels of 2008-2009, the report said.
According to a MarketWatch report, layoffs are part of a strategy by tech firms to maintain viability through 2023 and beyond.
Data from layoffs.fyi, a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs, showed that 1,495 tech companies have sacked 246,267 employees since the onset of Covid-19, but 2022 has been the worst year for the tech sector and early 2023 can even be grimmer, CNBC TV-18 reported on Thursday.
As of mid-November, more than 73,000 workers in the US tech sector have been laid off in mass-level job cuts led by companies like Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, Roku, and others.
Meanwhile in India, over 17,000 techies have been handed over the pink slip.
Google’s parent company Alphabet has been thinking of laying off about 10,000 employees globally. CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday said: “What we’ve been trying hard to do, and you’ve seen the messaging for the past many, many months, is we are trying to make important decisions, be disciplined, prioritize where we can, rationalise where we can so that we are set up to better weather the storm, regardless of what’s ahead… I think that’s what we should focus on and try and do our best there.”