Meta lays offs 10,000 workers: A look at the most recent sackings in the tech industry
Written by Lucky Wilson | KGTO Writer on March 15, 2023
As the economy struggles and interest rates rise, the tech industry faces a wave of layoffs that have been sweeping the sector since last year. Many companies overestimated the demand during the pandemic and hired more workers than they could afford. Now they are cutting costs by letting go of thousands of employees, from big tech giants like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon to startups and apps. Meta recently announced the largest job cuts so far, with 10,000 workers losing their positions. In this article, we will explore more examples of these layoffs in the industry.
Meta lays off 10,000 people
Meta announced on Tuesday that it would slash its workforce by 10,000 people. This comes after the company, formerly known as Facebook Inc, laid off 11,000 employees four months ago. Meta Platforms is the first big tech company to have two rounds of mass layoffs in a short span of time.
The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff that the decision was part of his plan to make 2023 the “Year of Efficiency”. He said he wanted to cut $5 billion in costs and focus on building the metaverse, an integrated online environment that connects all of its products and services.
Microsoft lays off AI ethics team
Microsoft laid off its entire team dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence innovations are ethical and lead to responsible and sustainable outcomes. These firings are part of the recent spate of layoffs that led to 10,000 employees losing their jobs across the company in various departments. The ethics and society team was reportedly not very large, with only around 7 people remaining following the reorganisation in October.
The elimination comes as Microsoft pours billions into its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the technology that powers the new AI-boosted Bing. Despite some really impressive capabilities, AI chatbots are still in their infancy and are sparking debate surrounding ethical concerns. Microsoft’s move calls into question its commitment to ensuring that its AI technology remains grounded and addresses the ethical concerns being raised.
Atlassian lays off 5% of its workforce
Atlassian, the company behind tools like Jira, Trello, and Confluence on March 7 announced that it’s now laying off about 500 employees after a reorganisation last month. That’s around 5% of its total workforce. The company continues to report net losses in its quarterly earnings releases even as company co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar stated in the announcement that the move shouldn’t be seen as a reflection of the company’s financial performance.
“We’ve made hard calls to reduce our investment in specific areas, in order to reinvest in others,” the co-founders wrote. “This is different to a financially-driven reduction, where you would look to make ‘broad-based cuts’ – for example, a 10% cut equally distributed across every org within the company. This is not what is happening here.”
Waymo goes through 2nd round of layoffs
Self-driving car company Waymo is going through a second round of layoffs this month. The Alphabet subsidiary has cut 137 staff members, bringing the total cuts to 8% of its workforce this year – or 209 employees in all. Waymo said the cuts would let it “focus on commercial success.” The news came the same week Waymo announced plans to start fully autonomous vehicles.
Twitter sacks 200 more employees
Following Musk’s takeover in late October 2022, Twitter has already fired 50 per cent of the 7,500-strong workforce. But as it stands, the layoffs are far from over. The company sacked over 200 more employees late last month, and one of them was even an Elon Musk loyalist – Esther Crawford, chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the platform’s Blue subscription. A post on Blind, an anonymous platform for verified workers, shows the extent of the layoffs so far: 50% in human relations, 60% in sales and marketing, 35% in engineering, 40% in finance and 80% in project management.
GitHub to fire 10% of its staff
Microsoft-owned internet hosting service for software development GitHub followed its parent company in announcing layoffs last month, saying it’s letting go 10% of its staff through the end of its fiscal year. The company reportedly had 3,000 employees before, meaning 300 employees are about to be laid off. GitHub is also shutting down all of its offices, partly because they weren’t already being fully utilised, and will make way for a remote-only culture. The company is also continuing its hiring freeze which it first announced in January.
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