As 2022 gradually draws to a close, several prominent tech companies have moved to sack thousands of their employees.
During the past week alone, some 20,000 employees of Silicon Valley companies were let go, one US newspaper reported.
Amazon
Reports emerged this week that tech giant Amazon - owned by one of the world’s wealthiest people, Jeff Bezos - is looking to lay off around 10,000 staff members.
Despite affecting only a small portion of the company’s workforce, which is over 1.5 million, this layoff is expected to become the biggest in Amazon’s history, with both technology and corporate employees due to be discharged.
In 2020, the company doubled the number of its employees, but this year it ended up enacting a hiring freeze.
Meta*
In November, prominent social media company Meta announced its plans to lay off 11,000 employees, which amounts to about 13 percent of its workforce.
The move came amid a decrease in the company’s value. It is currently valued at about $256 billion, a far cry from the $1 trillion the social media powerhouse was once worth.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that, while Meta hired aggressively during the COVID pandemic amid a surge in social media use, online commerce returning to the pre-pandemic levels this year resulted in the company’s revenue being “much lower” than he expected.
Through the acquisition of Twitter by tech mogul extraordinaire Elon Musk in the last days of October, the company experienced some serious changes - as almost half of its 7,500 employees got laid off.
Among those sacked this month were Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and legal, policy, and trust department chief Vijaya Gadde.
Elon Musk himself warned that Twitter is unlikely to “survive the upcoming economic downturn” if the company does not secure “significant subscription revenue”.
It Does Not End There
Other companies which ended up cutting their employees lose en masse this year include Snapchat’s parent company Snap, ride-hailing company Lyft and streaming service Netflix.
Also, Google’s parent company Alphabet has reportedly been advised this week by one of its shareholders, TCI Fund Management, to decrease both its workforce and its salary expenses.
*Meta is regarded as an extremist organization in Russia and is banned there.