The number of layoffs by internet businesses this year alone has exceeded that of the Great Recession, which hit the world in 2008-2009 and was sparked by the failure of Lehman Brothers.
IT businesses laid off approximately 65,000 individuals in 2008, and a similar number of people lost their jobs in 2009, according to statistics from worldwide outplacement and career transitioning agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Comparatively, 965 IT firms have fired more than 150,000 workers globally this year, exceeding the Great Recession-era highs of 2008–2009.
The IT cutbacks, led by businesses like Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others, are expected to get worse in the first few months of 2019.
According to a MarketWatch study, layoffs are a part of a plan used by tech companies to stay profitable through 2023 and beyond.
Since the start of Covid-19, 1,495 tech businesses have laid off 246,267 people, according to statistics from layoffs.fyi, a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs. However, 2022 has been the worst year for the industry, and early 2023 might be much worse.
IT firms like Meta, Twitter, and Cisco did massive layoffs
More than 73,000 US IT industry employees have been let go since mid-November due to widespread employment layoffs spearheaded by firms including Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, Roku, and others.
In India alone, almost 17,000 tech workers have been let go. Amazon and HP Inc., two major PC and printer manufacturers, have entered the worldwide layoff season and were expected to fire up to 6,000 and more than 20,000 people, respectively, in the coming days.
Global job cuts have begun at networking company Meta, affecting approximately 4,000 people.
According to reports, Google is preparing for significant layoffs early in the upcoming year, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, has allegedly given frightened Google employees no assurance that this won’t happen.
Pichai stated, “it’s really tough to predict the future, so, unfortunately, I can’t honestly sit here and make forward-looking commitments” at a company-wide meeting with employees.
According to him, the firm is working hard to “make crucial decisions, be disciplined, prioritize where we can, and rationalize where we can” so that it is better prepared to weather whatever comes next.
“I think that’s what we should focus on and try and do our best there,” Pichai added. This year these layoffs took most of the headlines. IT companies started laying off one after another. Now it is quite interesting to observe what are the effects of these layoffs in the upcoming year 2023.
