Here Are The Top 15 Biggest Tech Layoffs Of All Time

The ongoing global economic downturn has hit several industries alike, forcing many to lay off thousands of employees to cut costs.

As for the tech industry, the row of mass layoffs from major companies started with Twitter last year, soon after its new CEO Elon Musk took charge. Nearly half of its global workforce was sent home in a week.

But that was far from the end of it as Twitter did not even make it into the top 10 biggest layoffs in the industry. Several tech giants followed up after Twitter’s layoffs, quickly making it to the top 5.

That being said, here are the biggest layoffs in the tech industry of all time.

Top 5

Google is at the top of this list with a whopping 12,000 employees fired from work on January 20, 2023, just 3 days ago. But this makes up only 6% of its total workforce.

Facebook’s parent company Meta said goodbye to 11,000 employees, but this was back in November 2022. This was 13% of the company’s employees, more than double the amount Google lost proportionally.

Then come Amazon and Microsoft, both of whom are tied for the third spot with 10,000 employees let go on a single day. Amazon did so on November 16, 2022, but Microsoft did it recently on 18th January 2023.

The precise number of employees fired remains unknown, so we will never know which company had the lead in this case.

The 5th position is also tied up between Salesforce and Amazon. Both Salesforce and Amazon fired 8,000 employees, even on the same date on January 4, 2023. This brings up the total number of recently fired Amazon employees to an alarming 16,000.

All Top 15

Cisco and Philips are also on this list at 8th and 9th respectively. Cisco fired 4,100 employees in November last year, while Philips was only short by 100 employees at 4,000, in October of the same year.

Uber is at the bottom of the top 10, but even this spot is shared between two names. It shares the rank with Twitter, both of whom fired 3,700 employees. But while Uber lost 14% of its employees, Twitter, as aforementioned, lost around half of its employees.

The full list of the top 15 is shown below.

Company  Employees Fired Date %
Google 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%
Twitter 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%

Follow ProPakistani on Google News & scroll through your favourite content faster!

Support independent journalism

If you want to join us in our mission to share independent, global journalism to the world, we’d love to have you on our side. If you can, please support us on a monthly basis. It takes less than a minute to set up, and you can rest assured that you’re making a big impact every single month in support of open, independent journalism. Thank you.



  • Get Alerts

    Follow ProPakistani to get latest news and updates.


    ProPakistani Community

    Join the groups below to get latest news and updates.



    >