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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
\nBut with the return to more-or-less normal life \u2014 barring the economic crisis driven by sanctions on Russia \u2014 the market has slumped and many techies are facing redundancy.
\nThe big one is\u00a0Facebook owner Meta*, where CEO\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg\u00a0announced he was shedding 11,000 jobs out of a total 87,000 in November.
\nA week later\u00a0Cisco Systems, the firm named after its home city, decided to part ways with 4,100 workers, five per cent of its staff.
\nThen this January, Business software giant\u00a0Salesforce\u00a0said it was cutting its workforce by 10 per cent \u2014 around 8,000 redundancies \u2014 on top of 1,000 anno8nced in November.
\nTwitter’s new owner Elon Musk famously\u00a0sacked\u00a03,700 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.
\nThe next head to roll at Twitter will be Musk’s, after a straw poll he ran on the site on whether to\u00a0quit as CEO\u00a0came back in the affirmative.
\nCryptocurrency traders\u00a0Coinbase and Kraken\u00a0dumped 1,100 staff each last year, unsurprisingly given the crisis of confidence in the crypto market. Over at food delivery service\u00a0DoorDash, 1,250 jobs were lost in November.
\n*Facebook and Meta are both are banned in Russia for extremist activities<\/p>\n