It's just been 8 days since this month began, but over 8,000 employees have been fired by 22 companies this month. The focus has been on Twitter as Elon Musk began layoffs last week but it is a part of a larger trend in the technology sector. Even Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is not far behind as the company is expected to begin layoffs this week.
Tech companies both big and small have for a while been firing employees or freezing their hiring process with reasons varying from over hiring to effects of pandemic and even economic slowdown. According to a recent tally by Crunchbase, until October about 45,000 workers were laid off in the US tech sector.
India is facing a similar situation with around 15,708 workers losing their jobs. According to inc42.com these layoffs include companies like BYJU's, Cars24, OLA and more.
As the world economy is heading towards recession with unchecked rising inflation and central banks across the globe are increasing the interest rate it is expected that more tech companies will start layoffs or freeze jobs.
Here are the top companies that have frozen hiring or started layoffs.
Musk began firing Twitter employees right after the takeover. It began with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. After which the microblogging platform fired nearly half of its 7,500 staff. The company let go close to 90 per cent of its Indian staff from the marketing, communications and engineering teams. The layoffs by Twitter have also prompted a class action lawsuit by the company's former employees.
Meta
Facebook-parent Meta is planning to lay off around 1,000 employees this week as reported by The Wall Street Journal. They have already begun downsizing in an effort to cut down costs by giving the employees a limited time period to apply for a different position in the organisation. This move comes after the tech giant in October, forecasted a weak holiday quarter and increased costs next year.
Udaan
Business-to-business e-commerce platform Udaan has sacked nearly 350 regular employees that were on a payroll also asking hundreds of contractual workers to leave too. This according to reports was done as a cost-cutting measure and to tackle redundancies in certain roles.
Practically
Practically an edu-tech company has fired its permanent staff members and withheld their salaries. The company had not been paying its employees salary for the past four months due to fund crunch and also stalled fundraising push for holding back salaries.
Intel
Intel while declaring their earnings for the third quarter said that it will be reducing its workforce by firing around 20 per cent of its employees in the next year. This will help the company cut down annual spending of $10 billion by 2025.
Amazon
Amazon has not begun or made any announcements regarding firings but the company has frozen corporate hiring that includes roles in physical and online retail businesses.
Apple
Apple like Amazon has paused its hiring process for jobs outside research and development. The freeze will not affect teams working on long-term projects or future devices but it will affect jobs in hardware and software engineering roles.
Stripe
Stripe and Irish-American financial services company has announced this month that it will lay off around 14 per cent of its workforce. Stating the reason the CEO Patrick Collins in an email to his employees said that they had overhired and blamed inflation, higher interest rates, energy shocks and reduced investment budgets for the layoffs.
Byju's
Byju's during the beginning of this month announced that they will begin laying off around 2,500 employees. The reasons given by the company include job redundancy and duplication in roles.
Seagate
Seagate in October, announced that it plans to lay off 8 per cent of its global workforce which equals to about 3,000 employees. The company is firing employees due to economic uncertainty and declining demand for its parts.
Lyft
Lyft earlier this month said it would lay off 13 per cent or about 700 employees of its workforce. This is part of their latest cost-cutting step to fight the weakening economy. This is after the company let go 60 employees earlier this year and also froze hiring in September.
Opendoor
Opendoor, a real estate technology company, let go nearly 18 percent of its workforce this month letting go about 550 people across all functions. The employees that will be fired will receive 10 weeks severance pay with an additional two weeks of pay for every full year and the current healthcare benefits will remain active for the rest of the month and an additional three months.
Unacademy
EdTech unicorn Unacademy this week fired 10 per cent of their workforce which accounts for 350 employees in a third round of layoffs this year. The layoffs would happen across verticals that would either be shut or scaled-down. The employees that have been fired will be getting severance pay that is equal to their notice period and an additional two months salary with medical insurance coverage for an additional year.
Spotify
The streaming company Spotify fired 38 employees last month from its Gimlet and Parcast studios that produce Spotify Original podcast content. This comes after the cancellation of 11 Spotify original podcasts.
