Dozens of big and small US tech firms are laying off staff just two years after they embarked on a hiring spree. We take a look at where the jobs axe is falling the hardest.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it brought saw a sharp rise in demand for software and tech solutions, as millions switched to working from home or just sat glued to online streaming and gaming services.
The ensuing boom saw firms across the San Francisco bay area’s ‘Silicon Valley’ tech hub hiring on tens of thousands of new staff to cope.
But with the return to more-or-less normal life — barring the economic crisis driven by sanctions on Russia — the market has slumped and many techies are facing redundancy.
The big one is Facebook owner Meta*, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he was shedding 11,000 jobs out of a total 87,000 in November.
A week later Cisco Systems, the firm named after its home city, decided to part ways with 4,100 workers, five per cent of its staff.
Then this January, Business software giant Salesforce said it was cutting its workforce by 10 per cent — around 8,000 redundancies — on top of 1,000 anno8nced in November.
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk famously sacked 3,700 employees right after buying out the social media site in its entirety in October, although that was ostensibly due to a shift from censoring users on political grounds to child safeguarding and finding new income streams.
The next head to roll at Twitter will be Musk’s, after a straw poll he ran on the site on whether to quit as CEO came back in the affirmative.
Cryptocurrency traders Coinbase and Kraken dumped 1,100 staff each last year, unsurprisingly given the crisis of confidence in the crypto market. Over at food delivery service DoorDash, 1,250 jobs were lost in November.
*Facebook and Meta are both are banned in Russia for extremist activities

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