Last Updated on: 4th July 2023, 02:02 pm
Here Are The Best 15 Biggest Tech Layoffs Of All Time
The ongoing global economic downturn has similarly hit a number of industries, forcing many to lay off thousands of employees to cut costs.
As for the tech industry, the spate of mass layoffs at big companies started with Twitter last year, shortly after the new CEO, Elon Musk, took over. Almost half of the global workforce was sent home within a week.
But that wasn’t the end, as Twitter didn’t even rank in the top 10 biggest layoffs in the industry. Several tech giants followed the Twitter layoffs, quickly climbing into the top 5.
With that in mind, these are the biggest layoffs of all time in the tech industry:
Top 5
Google tops that list with 12,000 employees who were laid off on January 20, 2023, just three days ago. However, this corresponds to only 6% of the total workforce.
Facebook’s parent company Meta laid off 11,000 employees, but that was in November 2022. That was 13% of the company’s employees, more than double what Google lost proportionately.
Next is Amazon and Microsoft, both in third place with 10,000 laid off in a single day. Amazon did it on November 16, 2022, but Microsoft recently did it on January 18, 2023.
The exact number of employees laid off is not known, so we will never know which company took the initiative in this matter.
Fifth place is also between Salesforce and Amazon. Both Salesforce and Amazon even laid off 8,000 employees on the same day, January 4, 2023. This brings the total number of Amazon employees recently laid off to a staggering 16,000.
All Top 15
Cisco and Philips are also on this list at numbers 8 and 9, respectively. Cisco laid off 4,100 employees in November last year, while Philips had 100 fewer than 4,000 employees in October of the same year.
Uber is at the bottom of the top 10, but even that spot is split between two names. It shares the rank with Twitter, which has laid off 3,700 employees. But while Uber lost 14% of its employees, Twitter lost around half of its employees, as noted above.
The full list of the top 15 is below.
| Company | Employees Fired | Date | % |
| 12,000 | 1/20/2023 | 6% | |
| Meta | 11,000 | 11/9/2023 | 13% |
| Amazon | 10,000 | 11/16/2022 | 3% |
| Microsoft | 10,000 | 1/18/2023 | 5% |
| Salesforce | 8,000 | 1/4/2023 | 10% |
| Amazon | 8,000 | 1/4/2023 | 2% |
| Booking.com | 4,375 | 7/30/2020 | 25% |
| Cisco | 4,100 | 11/16/2022 | 5% |
| Philips | 4,000 | 10/24/2022 | |
| Uber | 3,700 | 5/6/2020 | 14% |
| 3,700 | 11/4/2022 | 50% | |
| Uber | 3,000 | 5/18/2020 | 13% |
| Better.com | 3,000 | 3/8/2022 | 33% |
| Groupon | 2,800 | 4/13/2020 | 44% |
| Peleton | 2,800 | 2/8/2022 | 20% |
Also Read: PayPal Will Soon Lay Off More Than 2,000 Employees
