Topline
Hundreds of employees were cut from major tech companies this week, including at Amazon, Google and Duolingo, as businesses look to “rightsize” their workforces and cut costs, following up on a parade of layoffs that dominated the news cycle and led to even steeper cuts amid lingering recession fears in 2022 and 2023.
Key Facts
Twitch, a live streaming site owned by Amazon, announced plans to cut 35% of its staff (roughly 500 employees), CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post Wednesday, saying Twitch has “work to do to rightsize” the company, calling it “meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business,” while Amazon’s audiobook division Audible also conducted a round of cuts affecting 100 employees.
That same day, Amazon announced plans to cut “several hundred” employees at its Prime Video and MGM Studios divisions, following a review of “nearly every aspect” of the company’s business operations, according to a memo obtained by Forbes from Mike Hopkins, the senior vice president of Prime Video (shares of Amazon have inched up 2% on the year, to $154.62).
On Wednesday, Google laid off “hundreds” of employees across several divisions, including its engineering and hardware teams, as well as employees developing its voice-operated virtual assistant, Google Assistant, according to an internal email obtained by the New York Times and Semafor (Google’s shares price has climbed 2.85% this year, to $142.65).
Language learning app Duolingo this week slashed 10% of its contract employees (it’s not immediately clear how many workers this affects), as the company pivots toward relying on artificial intelligence for content generation, multiple outlets reported, though the company said none of its full-time employees would be affected by the layoffs (shares of Duolingo have slumped 6.54% on the year, to $212).
AI startup Humane also said this week it will cut 4% of its workforce (10 employees), with company founder and CEO Bethany Bongiorno writing on LinkedIn the cuts are part of an initiative that includes “some changes to best prepare us for continued growth.”
Discord CEO Jason Citron announced this week the platform will cut 17% of its workforce (roughly 170 employees) to “sharpen [its] focus and improve the way [it] work[s] together to bring more agility” to the company, The Verge reported.
Video game software developer Unity Software announced in a regulatory filing it will cut one-quarter of its staff (roughly 1,800 jobs) as part of a restructuring plan to “position itself for long-term and profitable growth” (Shares of Unity have dropped nearly 13.5% on the year, to just over $34).
Surprising Fact
While tech companies lean into layoffs this month, the total number of cuts pales in comparison to the number of employees who lost their jobs last January. Online tracker Layoffs.fyi found 37 tech companies made layoffs so far this month, a far cry from the 278 companies that cut their head counts last January.
Big Number
More than 305,000. That’s how many employees lost their jobs in major U.S. layoffs last year, according to Forbes’ layoff tracker, which included layoffs affecting 100 or more jobs. The biggest of those cuts came in July, when now-bankrupt trucking company Yellow laid off all 30,000 of its employees. Preceding Yellow Corporation were a pack of tech and manufacturing companies announcing layoffs, including Amazon, which announced plans in January 2023 to cut 8,000 employees amid an “uncertain economy,” and laid off another 9,000 workers in November, after cutting 10,000 jobs in late 2022. Google parent Alphabet cut another 12,000 employees in January 2023 due to what CEO Sundar Pichai called “tough choices,” while Meta and Microsoft each laid off 10,000 positions that same month (Meta cut another 6,000 employees two months later).
Tangent
Banking giant Citigroup announced Friday it will cut 20,000 employees over the next two years, according to a statement from CFO Mark Mason, following a $1.8 billion fourth quarter net loss, the bank’s worst quarter in 15 years. Citigroup’s cuts follow a string of layoffs at major U.S. banks, following investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which cut 4,000 employees last year, and JPMorgan Chase, which let go of 1,000 employees in May.
Further Reading
Over 305,000 Laid Off In Major U.S. Cuts This Year—Here Are The Biggest (Forbes)
2023 Layoff Tracker: Nike Will Reportedly Cut ‘Hundreds’ Of Employees (Forbes)
Amazon Is Laying Off Hundreds Of Twitch, Prime Video And MGM Studios Employees (Forbes)