Although the tech industry has seen a shocking number of job cuts last year, 2023 has been much worse. The massive wave of layoffs has shut down hundreds of thousands of workplaces, turning 2023 into the worst year the tech industry has ever seen.
According to data presented by AltIndex.com, tech companies laid off over 226,000 employees year-to-date, almost 40% more than in 2022.
More than 405,000 Job Cuts in Three Years
Facing an uncertain global economy, inflation, ongoing supply chain issues, and slowing revenue growth, the tech companies picked up the pace of layoffs in 2023, led by the industry`s giants, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. But hundreds of other smaller tech companies, from retail and crypto to the transportation market, have also been forced to make painful cost-cutting measures, resulting in the highest number of layoffs the tech industry has ever seen.
As our charts based on data from Layoffs.fyi shows, layoffs in 2023 have far outpaced last year`s cuts. Between January and December 2022, tech companies laid off 164,744 employees, almost eleven times more than 15,000 reported a year before.
However, in 2023, the layoff numbers exploded. The Layoffs.fyi data show a shocking 75,912 people lost their jobs in January alone, almost half of all layoffs reported in 2022. February saw a decline with roughly 40,000 job cuts. Although the number of layoffs continued falling in the next three months, tech companies still reported almost 73,000 job cuts in this period. Since then, they have let go nearly 24,000 staff members, pushing the total number of layoffs to 226,117 as of last week.
The layoff figures for the last three years are even worse. Statistics show that tech companies laid off more than 405,000 people since the beginning of 2021.
Nearly One-Third of All Reported Job Cuts Came from only Ten Companies
US tech giants had a massive role in the 2023 wave of layoffs. In fact, statistics show US companies made eight out of the ten largest job cuts reported this year.
Analyzed by the company, Google has made the biggest layoff not only in 2023 but since COVID-19 hit. The tech giant let go 12,000 members of its staff, two thousand more than Meta and Microsoft.
Amazon made the fourth-largest layoff this year, with 9,000 reported job cuts. Flink, Salesforce, and Dell follow with 8,500, 8,000, and 6,650 layoffs, respectively. Statistics show that nearly one-third of all reported job cuts in the tech industry this year, or roughly 79,000, came from only ten companies.
