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 | % |
| 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% |
IBM laid off over 60,000 employees in 1993 – possibly the largest tech layoff ever.