How Many Tech Workers Were Laid Off Since January 2022?

After the at-times turbulent years of 2022 and 2023, large companies from the tech sector seem to have weathered the multiple crises and come out the other side relatively unscathed. The shares of Facebook's parent company Meta, for example, shot up by $75 in one day when the results for the fourth quarter of 2023 were announced in February 2024. This increased the company's market capitalization by $196 billion in one day - a Wall Street record. This result was made possible not only by economic performance but also by staff cuts.

21,000 employees have had to leave Mark Zuckerberg's company since January 2022. Only Amazon has made more redundancies in the same period. In total, around 460,000 people were laid off in the past two years, the majority of them at companies headquartered in the United States. After a peak in the first quarter of 2023, the waves of redundancies had subsided but could become an issue again in 2024.

As our chart shows, according to crowd-sourced data from the Layoffs.fyi portal, 34,000 employees were laid off from tech companies between January 1 and February 13, 2024. This means more people were fired halfway through the current quarter than in four of the eight remaining three-month periods since the start of 2022.

This past January, two other GAMAM members, Microsoft and Google, announced plans to lay off 1,900 and 1,000 people, respectively. Other well-known tech companies such as Twitch, Salesforce, Citrix and eBay also reduced their workforce by three- to four-digit numbers. The German software service provider SAP, which announced 8,000 job cuts as part of a "restructuring process" on January 23, is responsible for 23% of the tech and start-up employees laid off in 2024 to date.

Also partly responsible for the unprecedented wave of layoffs are Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and increased plant closures in China due to the People's Republic's zero-covid strategy, which has significantly exacerbated the global economic situation. In addition to external factors, these layoffs can also be attributed to miscalculations from previous years. Meta, for example, increased its workforce by 60 percent between 2019 and 2021, from nearly 45,000 to 72,000 employees. The only GAMAM member skirting major layoff rounds is Apple, allegedly in part due to CEO Tim Cook taking a pay cut of $50 million, 40 percent of his total income generated from the company.