Tech Industry Retrenches 20,000 Employees

In the last few days, the technology industry have witnessed the highest laid off of employees in more than a decade, as over 20,000 employees have been relieved of their duties.

NATIONAL ECONOMY findings revealed that technology companies like Twitter, Snap, Meta, Lyft, Netflix and Amazon, among others, planned to lay off a huge percentage of their workers.

For instance, Meta said, it will lay off about 11,000 out of 87,314, representing 13 per cent of its workforce; Amazon also planned to lay off 10,000 out of 1,544,000 of its employees; twitter to lay off 3,700 out of 7,500 of its workers, Lyft to sack 700 out of 5,064 workers and Netflix retrenched 450 out of 11,300 employees.

Executives of the companies concerned, said the reason for the mass retrenchment was due to overzealous hiring during the pandemic and a slowdown in e-commerce activity, among others.

For instance, Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy said, the company began a cost-cutting review, which included scaling down businesses that haven’t been profitable, such as its devices unit.

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Also, in a message to employees, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, announced that the decision was made by Jassy and the leadership team due to the uncertain economy and in light of how many people Amazon has hired in recent years.

“We are facing an unusual macro-economic environment, and want to balance our hiring and investments with being thoughtful about this economy,” Galetti added, while noting that, the company had already issued hiring pauses in other divisions and decided to shut down new corporate hiring across the board.

Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced that it will cut 13 per cent of its workforce.

In the same vein, Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg said, the cuts were some of the most difficult changes the company has made in history.

Zuckerberg said, “Today I am sharing some of the most difficult changes we have made in Meta’s history. I have decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.

“We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”