The tech sector’s massive layoffs don’t appear to be slowing anytime soon. Layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi is reporting that over 250,000 tech workers have been let go in 2023.
Many of these once high-flying tech companies, with unprecedented valuations and growth-at-all-costs strategies, are continuing to scale back. The efforts, which started in May 2022, have resulted in massive layoffs by a range of employers, from startups to publicly traded companies worth billions of dollars.
Tech company layoffs are happening for a variety reasons. But it’s clear that the industry is in an entirely different place than it was in 2021, when dealmaking was happening at a rapid pace, and investors were jumping head first into funding rounds with sky-high valuations.
Fast Company is compiling an ongoing list of tech companies that have announced layoffs in 2023 so far:
December 2023 tech layoffs
Spotify
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced on December 4 that the company would be instituting its third round of layoffs for the year. This cut is expected to cost a whopping 17% of Spotify employees (1,500 people) their jobs.
November 2023 tech layoffs
Unity
The video game software company, Unity, is laying off 265 employees, primarily from the company’s Wētā Digital division as of November 28.
ONE
On November 27, Our Next Energy (ONE), an electric-vehicle battery startup, announced it had cut 128 employees—25% of its workforce. Executives blamed market conditions for the massive layoffs.
ByteDance (Nuverse)
The TikTok owner announced that it would be laying off hundreds of employees on November 27. Most of the layoffs will come from it’s “Nuverse” gaming division which it says has failed to compete with more established mobile-gaming companies.
Vox Media
Vox Media, owner of The Verge, New York Magazine, and Vox.com, announced a layoff of 4% of its workforce. Most of the cuts will be in technology and analytics roles, as well as product and design, as struggles to generate advertising revenue have been mounting.
Nextdoor
The neighborhood-focused social platform said in its third-quarter earnings report that it plans to reduce staff by 25% as part of a cost-saving plan. “This reduction in our team is the hardest decision we have had to make at Nextdoor,” CEO Sarah Friar said in a statement.
OpenSea
Devin Finzer, cofounder and CEO of the NFT marketplace, said on X that it was “shifting to a smaller team with a direct connection to users.” The market for NFTs has fallen significantly since its peak in early 2022.
October 2023 tech layoffs
Nokia
On October 19, telecommunications and tech giant Nokia announced that it will be cutting up to 14,000 workers, or as much as 16% of it’s global workforce.
Qualcomm
The semiconductor and wireless technology giant announced this month that it would lay off about 1,258 employees, making it the tech company that has announced the most layoffs by number of individual workers in October, according to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi.
Qualcomm told CNBC that the layoffs were part of “restructuring actions” that would free up resources to enable “investments in key growth and diversification opportunities.” While 1,258 employees are significant, it represents less than 2.5% of Qualcomm’s 51,000 workforce.
The social media giant announced it would be eliminating another 668 jobs. Sadly, this is LinkedIn’s third major round of job cuts this year alone, following cuts in February and May. LinkedIn said the “talent changes” were necessary for managing its business so it could continue to “invest in strategic priorities for our future.” This round’s 668 layoffs equal about 3% of LinkedIn’s total workforce.
Bandcamp
It’s been a brutal month for Bandcamp, an audio distribution platform that was until recently part of Epic Games. Epic acquired Bandcamp in 2022 only to announce last month that it would sell the company to B2B music platform Songtradr. Epic made the Bandcamp sale announcement at the same time it laid off around 16% of its employees, with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney saying the company has “been spending way more money than we earn.”
Unfortunately for Bandcamp employees, it is now known that not all of them will keep their jobs under the new ownership. At least one former Bandcamp employee said on X that “about half the company was laid off” this morning. Layoffs.fyi puts the number of Bandcamp layoffs at 58, which is 50% of the workforce—the largest percentage of any tech company so far this month.
September 2023 tech layoffs
Epic Games
The creator of popular video game Fortnite was also hit by layoffs on September 28. Epic will be laying off 16% of its staff, about 830 people. An additional 250 people are expected to leave the company with the sale of audio-distribution platform BandCamp to Songtradr and the spin-off of Epic’s SuperAwesome advertising company.
Roblox
Video-game company Roblox laid off 30 people on its talent acquisition team on September 18, signaling that future growth will also be slowing down.
Airtable
Project-management software company Airtable laid off 237 people on September 15 which is about 27% of it’s workforce.
Chargepoint
Chargepoint, a maker of electric vehicle chargers, announced that it would be reducing its headcount by about 10% alongside its quarterly earnings call on September 6.
Roku
Streaming-tech company Roku announced in a September 6 SEC filing that it would reduce its workforce by 10%, equal to about 360 jobs.
August 2023 tech layoffs
Zebra Technologies
Zebra Technologies is a mobile-computing company that provides other companies with the technology needed to efficiently manufacture and ship their products. After a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced on August 29 that it was laying off 7% of it’s employees (approximately 700) after a sharp reduction of orders.
Wish
E-commerce site Wish filed a notice on August 2 stating that it plans to layoff 34% of its workforce (or 255 employees) over the fiscal year.
Planet
Satellite-imagery and data-analysis firm Planet laid off 117 employees (about 10% of total headcount) on August 1. In a note to employees, CEO Will Marshall stated that the company scaled too quickly and was unprepared for the marco economic environment to shift in 2023.
July 2023 tech layoffs
Binance
On July 14, the Wall Street Journal reported that crypto exchange Binance had laid off over 1,000 workers in recent weeks. These layoffs come shortly after the SEC filed a 136-page complaint against the company accusing it of evading U.S. law.
Microsoft
After laying off 10,000 employees earlier this year, Microsoft announced additional layoffs on July 11th. So far 276 jobs have been cut, primarily in sales roles across the company.
Amdocs
Multinational tech company Amdocs laid off 2,000 employees on July 6, primarily in the U.S. and Israel.
June 2023 tech layoffs
Uber
Uber announced layoffs of 200 employees —primarily in its recruitment division— on June 21.
Note that Uber’s drivers are not employees, and will not be laid off.
Grubhub
On June 14, Grubhub laid off 15% of its workforce, which means about 400 job cuts.
Spotify
Spotify laid off 200 employees on June 4, which is equal to 2% of their workforce.
May 2023 tech layoffs
ZipRecruiter
Job platform ZipRecruiter initiated layoffs of 20% of its employees (about 270 people) on May 31. The company had previously said job postings were slowing on the site.
Hiring and professional networking platform LinkedIn laid off 716 people on May 9. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which had layoffs in other divisions earlier in the year.
LinkedIn is just one of several hiring-centric tech companies to have layoffs in Spring of 2023, pointing to continued layoffs being likely across the tech industry.
Shopify
Shopify laid off 2,300 people, about 20% of their workforce, on May 4.
April 2023 tech layoffs
Dropbox
On April 27, Dropbox announced it was cutting 16% of the company’s workforce, equivalent to 500 jobs. CEO and cofounder Drew Houston blamed AI for the layoffs rather than the job market or other economic conditions.
Lyft
On April 21, Lyft reported a mass layoff of 30% of its company, or about 1,500 employees. The company also said it would not be hiring for an additional 250 roles.
Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed laid off 15% of its employees on April 20. The layoffs included shutting down Buzzfeed News.
March 2023 tech layoffs
Roku
On March 30, Roku laid off 6% of its workforce, about 200 employees.
Indeed
On March 22, job application and hiring platform Indeed laid off 2,200 workers, equal to 15% of their headcount.
This mass layoff is also bad news for employees of other tech companies: Indeed management said the job cuts occurred because they predicted a continued cooling of the hiring market (and future layoffs from other employers).
Amazon (Twitch)
Amazon announced layoffs of 9,000 more employees on March 9, bringing the total job cuts to 27,000 since November 2022.
This round affected Amazon’s cloud computing, HR, and advertising departments, as well as the popular Twitch streaming platform.
Meta
Meta (née Facebook) said that it would be laying off 10,000 employees on March 14. They also said they would not be filling 5,000 open roles. However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed that these layoffs did not mean that the company would be shifting its focus away from AI.
Waymo
Waymo, the autonomous driving division of Alphabet, reported layoffs of 137 employees on March 2. Combined with its earlier tech layoff, this brings the total number of employees for the company down by 8%.
February 2023 tech layoffs
On Saturday, February 25, Twitter laid off about 200 employees, as first reported by The New York Times. This represents about a 10% reduction in headcount following new CEO Elon Musk’s mass layoff in 2022.
Micron
Chip manufacturing company, Micron laid off 2,400 people on February 17. The layoffs affected about 5% of the company’s headcount.
Yahoo
Internet stalwart Yahoo cut 1,600 jobs on February 9. This was a whopping 20% of the company’s employees. The employer stated that more than half of the company’s ad-tech team would be affected.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy, a website hosting and domain name company, cut 8% of its workforce, equal to 530 layoffs, on February 8.
Zoom
Zoom, the video conferencing tool the world has been living through since 2020, laid off 15% of its workforce, or about 1,300 people, on February 7. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic Zoom’s profit skyrocketed more than most tech companies, leading to massive hiring, but the company is now saying it overdid it.
eBay
Online auction platform eBay laid off 4% of its employees on February 7, for about 500 jobs lost.
Dell
Dell laid off 6,650 employees on February 6. This is equal to about 5% of the computer company’s workforce.
January 2023 tech layoffs
PayPal
On January 31, PayPal announced it would be making 2,000 job cuts. This is equal to about 7% of the online payment platform’s workforce.
IBM
IBM announced it was laying off about 3,900 workers on January 25, but the company said it is still hiring in “higher growth” areas.
Spotify
The music streaming platform announced it would be laying off 6% of its workforce on January 24. This is estimated to translate to about 400 jobs lost.
Google (Alphabet)
On January 20, Google announced it was laying off 12,000 jobs, or about 6% of its workforce. Google CEO Sundar Pichai attributed mass tech company layoff to over-hiring during the boom of 2021 and 2022: “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Microsoft
On January 17, reports began to surface that Microsoft would be laying off 5% of its workforce, or 11,000 employees. Microsoft previously laid off about 2,000 employees over two rounds of layoffs in 2022.
Coinbase
Coinbase announced a new round of layoffs on January 10. Hit by both macro economic conditions and the declining crypto market, the cryptocurrency exchange platform is cutting a whopping 20% of its workforce, or 950 jobs. CEO Bryan Armstrong also alluded to scandals like the downfall of FTX causing a decrease in people’s trust in the crypto space.
Amazon
Amazon announced its largest layoffs ever on January 4. The tech giant laid off 18,000 people, primarily from their Amazon Stores and PXT (People Experience and Technology) teams, about 3% of its corporate workforce. This comes after mass layoffs announced in November.
Salesforce
Business software company Salesforce laid off 10% of its employees on January 4, equal to about 8,000 job cuts. The company blamed rapid hiring ahead of the economic downturn for the layoffs.
Vimeo
On January 4, video platform Vimeo was one of the first major tech companies to announce further layoffs in 2023. The employer laid off 11% of its workforce, primarily cutting jobs in Sales and R&D. In a letter to employees, CEO Anjali Sud said that the move was made to cut costs and keep Vimeo “sustainably profitable” in a deteriorating economic environment.
Tech company layoffs from 2022
Softbank layoffs
Tokyo-based firm Softbank will cut at least 20% of staff (100 positions) in its Vision Fund, Bloomberg reported on September 2.
The news follows last month’s announcement that the company had reported a $23 billion loss in its quarterly results—a setback driven in large part by the Vision Fund. “When we were turning out big profits, I became somewhat delirious, and looking back at myself now, I am quite embarrassed and remorseful,” SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said at the time.
Snap layoffs
Snap is planning to lay off about 20% of its employees, according to The Verge. The layoffs, which would affect more than 1,000 people, are anticipated to start on August 31, the report says. Areas that will see cuts are reportedly its hardware division, Zenly (a social mapping app it bought in 2017), and the team that works on ways for developers to build games and mini apps within Snapchat. A spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
Tier Mobility layoffs
German micro-mobility company Tier Mobility laid off 180 people, or about 16% of its workforce on August 23, according to a LinkedIn post by CEO Lawrence Leuschner. “Ultimately, we have to respond to the current economic and funding climate, reducing the number of projects and business lines we are focussing on as a company in order to accelerate our path to profitability,” Leuschner wrote.
Wayfair layoffs
Online retailer Wayfair announced on August 19 it was cutting 870 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce. In a letter to staff, CEO Niraj Shah wrote that “growth has not materialized as we had anticipated,” and as a result the team “is too large for the environment we are now in.”
While Wayfair fared quite well early in the pandemic—when people were working from home and looking to spruce up their home decor—that trajectory has stalled thanks in large part to rising inflation.
Stripe layoffs
Stripe laid off about 50 workers, TechCrunch reported on August 19. The fintech giant cut employees working on TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that Stripe acquired in 2021. The layoffs are reportedly part of Stripe’s decision to abandon TaxJar’s go-to-market efforts.
ThredUp layoffs
ThredUp, an online consignment retailer, announced during its August 15 earnings call that it was laying off 15% of its corporate workforce and closing a data processing center. It wasn’t clear how many employees the move affected.
“While we’ve prioritized the new approach to expenses, it’s proving hard to predict exactly how the customer is going to behave in the back half of the year and into the first part of 2023,” CEO James Reinhart told investors.
Peloton layoffs
Peloton told employees August 12 that it was cutting 784 jobs as the connected fitness maker continues to struggle to rebound to its pandemic highs. The layoffs will impact employees across its distribution and customer service teams.
The company is also planning to shutter some of its retail operations, in an effort to “balance” e-commerce and retail. “These changes are essential if Peloton is ever going to become cash flow positive. Cash is oxygen. Oxygen is life. We simply must become self-sustaining on a cash flow basis,” Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy wrote in a memo to employees.
Calm layoffs
Calm, the company behind the eponymous meditation app, laid off 20% of its staff on August 11. The move, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, would affect about 90 employees. Calm CEO David Ko told employees in a memo that the company’s leadership had “revisited the investment thesis behind every project” before it made changes that would help “prioritize the future, focus on growth and become a more efficient organization.”
Groupon layoffs
On August 8, Groupon laid off over 500 employees—or roughly 15% of its 3,416-person workforce. The cuts came in merchant development, sales, recruiting, engineering, product and marketing. In a letter to staff, CEO Kedar Deshpande said the shake-ups will allow Groupon to focus “only on mission-critical activities,” and admitted the company will now be “leaning on more external support.”
StubHub layoffs
The Utah-based online ticketing giant announced in early August it would be shuttering its San Francisco and Shanghai offices. CEO Eric Baker said “the majority of our employees in both locations” would lose their jobs; according to The Real Deal, both offices have in total around 160 employees.
Beyond Meat layoffs
Beyond announced August 4 it would lay off 40 people (4% of its global workforce), saying inflation has dampened consumer demand for the company’s plant-based meat substitutes. CEO Ethan Brown told the Wall Street Journal that Beyond’s plant-based ground beef recently sold for about $8 a pound, compared to $5 a pound for real meat. “That is a very difficult proposition when consumers have very high levels of inflation going on,” he said.
SoundCloud layoffs
SoundCloud CEO Michael Weissman sent a memo to employees on August 3 saying that the company would lay off around 20% of its workforce, as first reported by Billboard. “Today’s change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability,” Weissman wrote in the email. “We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company and that now extends to a reduction to our team.”
Robinhood layoffs
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev announced in a press release on August 2 that the company would lay off about 23% of its staff, mostly in operations, marketing and program management. Tenev blamed the cuts on high inflation and the crypto market crash, both of which have “further reduced customer trading activity and assets under custody,” he wrote in the memo. Robinhood had already laid off 9% of its workforce in April, a move that Tenev acknowledged “did not go far enough.”
Oracle layoffs
Oracle is among the latest tech firms to announce widespread layoffs. The Information reported on August 1 that the company has laid off an unspecified number of U.S. workers, with plans in the coming months to lay off some in Canada, India, and parts of Europe, which would equate to “thousands.” A spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment. However, several LinkedIn users, who listed their employment as Oracle, took to the social media platform to share they were part of the layoffs and were looking for new work.
Shopify layoffs
In July, Shopify laid off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 1,000 workers. CEO Tobi Lütke told employees at the time that he overestimated how long the e-commerce pandemic boom would last, expecting that the adaptation of online shopping would have permanently jumped ahead by 5 to 10 years.
Rivian layoffs
The the electric vehicle startup announced in July cuts to about 6% of its workforce (some 840 positions), citing concerns over rising interest rates, inflation, and increased commodity prices. “To fully realize our potential, our strategy must support our sustainable growth as we ramp towards profitability,” CEO RJ Scaringe wrote in a memo to employees announcing the layoffs.
Lyft layoffs
Lyft cut about 60 jobs in its rental division in July in an attempt to reorganize the business amid rising costs. The company also said it would discontinue its service where it offered its cars for long-term rentals.
Netflix layoffs
Netflix laid off 300 employees in June, after the company reported that it had lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade, and slowing revenue growth. Netflix, in an attempt to remedy the decline, said it was going to be rolling out an ad-supported tier in order to draw in more subscribers.
Coinbase layoffs
Coinbase told employees in June that the cryptocurrency exchange was reducing its headcount by about 18% ahead of the economic downturn. “While it’s hard to predict the economy or the markets, we always plan for the worst so we can operate the business through any environment,” CEO Brian Armstrong told employees.
Michael Grothaus and Regina Borsellino also contributed writing, reporting, and/or advice to this article.
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