Big Tech's job-slashing wave Facebook owner Meta's announcement on Tuesday that it will shed 10,000 jobs over the next few months is the latest in a series of mass layoffs in the once-unassailable tech sector, which is facing a huge downturn. The cuts in the company that also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, follow a cull of 11,000 jobs announced in November. Here are the others:
During Covid, Amazon had gone on a hiring spree to meet an explosion in demand for deliveries, doubling its global staff between the beginning of 2020 and start of 2022. At the end of September, the group had 1.54 million employees worldwide.
"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," CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees. Alphabet employed nearly 187,000 workers worldwide at the end of September 2022. The cuts represent a little over six percent of its total workforce.
The cuts were "in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities," the maker of the Windows operating system said in a US regulatory filing. The plan followed two smaller rounds of layoffs in 2022, one in July affecting less than one percent of the workforce and a second in October targeting under 1,000 people.
Workers around the world were shown the door and took to Twitter to vent their frustration or disbelief and say good-bye to one of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies. In late February, the New York Times reported that Twitter's workforce has dropped since late October to 2,000 from 7,500 employees, counting layoffs and resignations. The cull is part of Musk's push to find ways to pay for the mammoth $44 billion deal for which he took on billions of dollars in debt.
While its user numbers continue to grow -- 375 million daily users -- it is saddled by diminishing profits and competition from other apps, such as TikTok. jah-eab-jmy/cb/rl |
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