Tech layoffs surpass Great Recession levels, set to get worse in early 2023

San Francisco: The massive layoffs by the tech companies this year alone have surpassed the levels from the Great Recession the world went through 2008-2009 that began with Lehman Brothers collapse.

In 2008, tech companies laid off about 65,000 employees, and a similar number of workers lost their livelihoods in 2009, according to data by global outplacement and career transitioning firm global outplacement & career transitioning firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

By comparison, 965 tech companies have laid off more than 150,000 employees this year globally, surpassing the Great Recession levels of 2008-2009.

Led by companies like Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Salesforce and others, the tech layoffs are set to worsen early next year amid ongoing global macroeconomic conditions.

According to a MarketWatch report, layoffs are part of a strategy by tech firms to maintain viability through 2023 and beyond.

Data from layoffs.fyi, a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs, showed that 1,495 tech companies have sacked 246,267 employees since the onset of Covid-19, but 2022 has been the worst year for the tech sector and early 2023 can even be grimmer.

As of mid-November, more than 73,000 workers in the US tech sector have been laid off in mass-level job cuts led by companies like Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, Roku, and others.

Over 17,000 tech employees have been shown the door in India too.

Big Tech companies like Amazon and PC and printer major HP Inc have joined the global layoff season, and were set to lay off more than 20,000 and up to 6,000 employees in days to come, respectively.

Networking giant Cisco has started slashing nearly 4,000 jobs globally.

Google is reportedly bracing for a massive layoffs early next year and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly offered no assurance to worried Google employees that it won't happen.

In a companywide meeting with staff, Pichai said "it's really tough to predict the future, so unfortunately, I can't honestly sit here and make forward-looking commitments".

He told employees that what the company is trying hard to do "is to make important decisions, be disciplined, prioritise where we can, rationalise where we can, so that we are set up to better weather the storm, regardless of what's ahead".

"I think that's what we should focus on and try and do our best there," Pichai added.