Technology companies have laid off 153,000 employees worldwide since the beginning of 2023
Technology companies around the world have laid off more than 153,000 employees since the beginning of 2023, as the technology sector faces increasing pressures on both the cost and revenue sides.
According to data from layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs, the number of layoffs at tech companies for 2023 has increased more than sixfold since mid-January.
The data indicates that the year 2023 is heading towards surpassing the year 2022 as the year that witnesses the most layoffs in the technology sector.
And 528 technology companies have laid off 153,598 employees since the beginning of the year, compared to last year when 1,024 companies fired 154,336 employees in total.
Last week, Amazon announced that it would cut another 9,000 jobs, in addition to the 18,000 jobs it announced in January.
Meta, the parent company that owns the social networking site Facebook, two weeks ago, cut 10,000 jobs. Last month, Ericsson cut 8,500 jobs, Philips 6,000, and IBM 3,900 jobs.
And last January, Microsoft laid off 10,000 employees.
Several companies this year also announced the abolition of a number of jobs, exceeding a thousand in each of them, and among them were the companies “Yahoo”, “Twilio”, “Zoom” and “Paypal”, while “Dell” eliminated more than 6000 jobs. last February.
With interest rates rising repeatedly over the past year and into this year, and the world’s largest economy increasingly likely to enter recession, technology companies in America, and in many different countries, have turned to layoffs as a way to move companies toward greater operating efficiency.
In its attempts to rein in the country’s highest inflation in more than four decades, the Fed raised interest rates at nine consecutive meetings, starting in March last year, for a total of 475 basis points. That was the fastest rate hike since the 1980s.
These layoffs come in the wake of overemployment in these companies, coinciding with the recent technological boom, which followed the emergence and spread of the Covid-19 virus, and the issuance of work-from-home orders to prevent its spread, which caused major expansions of technology companies at the time.
