2024 is less than a month away, and tech companies are already ruining the lives of thousands of people.
It may sound harsh, but there’s no better way to describe mass layoffs by giant companies that make popular products. The latest is eBay, which announced its decision to lay off 1,000 employees this week despite posting a $1.3 billion profit last quarter.
But it’s not just eBay. Here are five other major tech companies that made significant layoffs in January alone.
eBay lays off 1,000 employees
1. Twitch
First up is Twitch, the leading video game streaming platform in the United States. Gamers often flock to Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. Twitch recorded a huge profit in its October financial report. From the outside looking in, you might think Twitch doesn’t need to cut hundreds of staff, but apparently that’s not the case.
Twitch confirmed in a blog post that the latest round of layoffs resulted in the elimination of “slightly more than 500” positions.
“I’m sure many of you are wondering why this is happening,” Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. “Over the last year, we have worked to build a more sustainable business for Twitch’s long-term viability, and we have made many decisions throughout the year to reduce costs and become more efficient. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still significantly larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.”
2.Google
Last week, the company behind the website that people probably use more than any other website announced major layoffs. Google confirmed in a company blog post that a staggering 12,000 roles have been cut. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that the job cuts are because Google is hiring based on “a different economic reality” than the current economic climate.
In case you’re wondering, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported revenue of $69 billion and profits of just under $14 billion in its latest quarterly earnings report.
3. Amazon
We already proved in the Twitch part of this article that Amazon made a lot of money in 2023. Now it’s time to talk about the mothership itself.
Amazon has laid off “hundreds” of employees in its streaming division and 30 in its Buy with Prime division this month alone. According to TechCrunch, Amazon has cut 27,000 jobs in the past two years alone.
“We regularly review our team structure and make adjustments based on business needs.Following our recent review, we have made the difficult decision to remove a small number of roles in our purchasing team at Prime. ,” Amazon says. a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Again, made by Amazon a lot of money.
4. Riot Games
For those who don’t know, Riot Games is the company behind several hit video games, including: league of legends and Valorant. Unfortunately, the popularity of these games didn’t prevent Riot from joining the Layoff bandwagon this month.
Riot acknowledged in a blog post that 530 jobs were cut globally this week. This represents approximately 11% of the company’s total workforce.
“Over the past few months, we have attempted to course-correct in a variety of ways,” CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote. “We asked our leaders to make trade-offs in what their teams were working on. We deployed hiring slowdowns and, in some cases, hiring freezes. We pushed for revenue growth. All of that has definitely paid off. It’s been tough for our team.”
But Jadeja says these tactics didn’t move the needle. “As we spoke with leaders across Riot, it became clear to everyone that these changes alone were not enough.”
Precise financial data about Riot is not as easy to find as other companies on this list, but data research firm Priori Data estimates that: league of legends In 2022, there were 180 million monthly active players.
5.TikTok
TikTok is the social center of the internet today, but that alone won’t be enough to prevent parent company ByteDance from cutting jobs.
About 60 employees were fired from TikTok earlier this week, according to NPR. NPR reports that it has more than 150 million active users in the U.S., despite ByteDance’s valuation of $225 billion. Again, no matter how big or important a product is, the people working on it cannot escape layoffs.
According to the Associated Press, TikTok did not provide a reason for the termination.
