Global Courant
ISTANBUL
Technology firms laid off nearly 200,000 workers in the first five months of this year amid risks of a global recession posed by high interest rates and falling advertising revenues, according to data compiled by Anadolu on Wednesday from the watch site layoffs.fyi.
The data showed that a total of 202,399 employees from 749 tech companies lost their jobs.
The figure is a significant increase over the total of 164,709 employees laid off by 1,057 tech firms in 2022.
Most of the layoffs took place at US tech companies like Google’s parent company Alphabet, followed by Meta, Microsoft formerly known as Facebook, and e-commerce company Amazon.
While Google laid off 12,000 people in late January, Meta began parting ways with 10,000 employees and closing 5,000 more open positions in mid-March.
Meta, which laid off more than 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, in November last year, began a new round of layoffs in mid-April.
Recent layoffs at Meta have affected Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, the research unit Reality Labs, Meta’s VR development, and the virtual reality headset Quest, developed by Reality Labs.
Microsoft announced in January that it would lay off 10,000 workers, less than 5% of its workforce, by the end of September this year.
Again in January, Amazon began laying off 18,000 employees, roughly 5% of the company’s 350,000 corporate employees worldwide – the largest layoff in the company’s history.
The e-commerce giant later announced in March that it would close about 9,000 more positions in the coming weeks.
The company’s total workforce has doubled during the coronavirus pandemic to meet high demand for e-commerce during lockdown measures, growing from 800,000 at the end of 2019 to over 1.6 million at the end of 2021.
Reddit, Disney, 3M, Yahoo, Affirm, Zoom, Dell, IBM, Salesforce and PayPal have also laid off thousands of workers in the US in recent months.
Outside the US, Canadian e-commerce firm Shopify laid off 2,300 workers in May, and German on-demand delivery service Flink laid off 8,000 in April.
Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson cut its workforce by 8,500 at the end of February, while German software company SAP parted ways with 3,000 employees in January.
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