If the rumors prove to be true, it’ll be the biggest mass layoff of staff in the ecommerce behemoth’s 28-year history. The figure is much larger than the number of staff the company laid off in the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s and the 2008 financial crash combined. “There is no specific department or location mentioned for the cuts; it is across the business,” a source reportedly told Computer World. “We were told this is as a result of over-hiring during the pandemic and the need for cost-cutting as the company’s financials have been on a declining trend,” they added.
Tech Layoffs: A Sector-Wide Issue
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in early November that he’d “decided to reduce the size of [Meta’s] team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.” Apple, conversely, said last month that it was being “very deliberate” when it came to hiring, with Tim Cook adding that the iPad manufacturer wasn’t hiring “everywhere in the company”. Just before this, in mid-October, Microsoft also announced layoffs “across multiple divisions” but confirmed soon after that less than one thousand staff members would be affected. Of course, Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter also resulted in mass staff layoffs, although it’s hard to parse how much of this was financially rather than ideologically motivated. With supply chain issues, a lack of consumer buying power, and other rising costs directly related to global issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine all expected to hurt tech companies’ ability to grow heading into 2023, it’s likely more layoffs in the tech sector will follow.
