The layoffs in Big Tech USA are not over. A few days ago Microsoft announced 1900 layoffs in the gaming sector. Overall, since the beginning of the year, cuts in the video game industry have reached 6,000. Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the cuts will continue into 2024.
“These role eliminations are not on the scale of last year’s reductions and will not affect all teams,” Pichai told employees Wednesday. Since last year, Alphabet, which includes Google, has cut about 6% of its employees, or about 12,000 workers. The company employed 182,000 people as of September 30 last year, according to its most recent quarterly results. We are now wondering if for Big Tech USA we are in the presence of a second wave of layoffs as happened exactly in the same period last year.
According to a website that tracks job losses in the tech sector, layoffs.fyi, the global tech sector has made 9,533 layoffs. At the same time last year, tech companies had laid off many more workers, about 38,000 employees. Therefore the phenomenon appears more contained. Globally.
As seen in this graphic from Statista using data collected by Layoffs.fyi in 2023, the tech sector saw a significant number of layoffs, with the Retail which was the hardest hit for the second consecutive year, with more than 32,000 employees laid off that year. This is followed by the consumer and hardware sectors, which recorded over 30 thousand and 24 thousand layoffs respectively. Overall, the year 2023 marked the highest number of layoffs in the global tech sector since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were over 167,000 layoffs in the tech sector in the first quarter alone.
Above you will find the quarterly performance. Overall, the layoffs affected over 70,000 employees. The situation worsened dramatically in the first quarter of 2023. The tech sector saw a record level of layoffs, with a staggering 167.4 thousand employees losing their jobs. Major tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and IBM all contributed to this figure during this quarter. Amazon, in particular, conducted two separate rounds of layoffs over the same period.
As for the companies that have fired, here is the update from Statista. Amazon leads the way with 27,000 layoffs in five separate rounds. Then there is Meta and Google with 21 thousand and 12 thousand cuts announced respectively.
The consequences.
Mass layoffs come as a shock to both those who leave and those who remain. As Sandra Sucher, co-author of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, wrote, layoffs have a detrimental effect on employees and company performance. Downsizing a workforce by just 1% can lead to a 31% increase in voluntary staff turnover the following year, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of South Carolina.
To know more.
The US Big Tech crisis, layoffs and the Apple case
Meta’s layoffs and the Big Tech crisis in a graph
When did the wave of layoffs in Big Tech USA begin? In a graph