After hiring with a vengeance during the Covid-19 pandemic, a less glorious era is shaping up for the tech giants, who are now laying off en masse. After Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, Google announced a layoff plan on Friday January 20. In total, 12,000 jobs will be cut there, said Sundar Pichai, the boss of his parent company, Alphabet. This represents 6% of the company’s workforce. “Over the past two years, we have experienced periods of spectacular growth. To accompany and fuel this growth, we have hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today”, writes the CEO, who assures “assume full responsibility for the decisions that [les] drove here”.
Google, which is mainly suffering from the fall in advertising, had increased its workforce by more than 15% each year between 2014 and 2021, to reach 157,000 employees worldwide. The world’s leading search engine is thus taking the path of many other tech companies. Since 2022, 1,150 of them have cut more than 190,000 jobs around the world.
At Microsoft, economic uncertainty costs 10,000 jobs
Two days before Google, Microsoft announced the dismissal of nearly 10,000 staff worldwide, or 5% of the company’s 220,000 employees. In a letter to his employees, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, cited the economic uncertainty and the changing priorities of his customers. “We are seeing organizations across all industries and geographies treading cautiously as some parts of the world are in recession and others are anticipating one,” he explained. During the two years of the pandemic, the number of Microsoft employees increased by 36%, from 163,000 in 2020 to 220,000 two years later.
The Redwood firm had already carried out two rounds of layoffs: a first in July 2022, which affected less than 1% of the workforce, and a second in October, which targeted less than 1,000 people. However, Microsoft’s situation is not as bleak as it seems, as L’Express explained earlier this week.
18,000 jobs cut at Amazon
E-commerce giant Amazon announced on January 5 that it would cut “just over 18,000” jobs worldwide. The redundancy plan must mainly concern the stores managed by the group and human resources. The distribution group had recruited with a vengeance during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the explosion in demand, doubling its global staff between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of 2022. It had 1.54 million employees at the end of September. .
The Seattle firm has begun laying off part of its teams in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica. In other regions of the world, job cuts are expected to take place in the coming weeks, particularly in China. Europe will not be spared: the United Kingdom, Spain and Luxembourg could be concerned, the CFDT Amazon union told our colleagues from France info. However, according to initial information, France would not be affected by these dismissals.
The first social plan in the history of Meta
Meta, the American group which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, among others, announced last November the loss of 11,000 jobs, or around 13% of its workforce – nearly one in seven positions. This is the first plan of the history of the company co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg 18 years ago.
Meta, which had some 87,000 employees worldwide at the end of September, reported a disappointing financial performance in the third quarter of 2022, with a sharp decline in revenue and profits and a stagnation in its number of users. “Not only has e-commerce returned to its previous trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and loss of advertising revenue have resulted in much lower sales than I had expected”, said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, in a message to all Meta employees. “I made this mistake and I take responsibility for it.” He also added that the group wanted to focus its resources and capital on “high priority growth areas”, such as its artificial intelligence engine, its advertising and professional platforms or its “metaverse” project.
At Twitter, half of the workforce thanked
Barely acquired by Elon Musk, Twitter began mass layoffs in early November 2022 affecting around half of the social network’s 7,500 employees. “There is unfortunately no other choice when the company is losing more than 4 million dollars a day”, defended Elon Musk who, upon his arrival, dissolved the board of directors of Twitter and thanked all group leaders.
To finance his takeover at 44 billion dollars, the billionaire heavily indebted the company whose financial health was already fragile since it suffered a significant deficit in the first two quarters of the year. On November 16, the entrepreneur warned Twitter employees still in office: they must be ready to “work long hours at high intensity” in order to “build a revolutionary Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world”, otherwise they will have to leave the company.
Under pressure, Snap lays off 20% of the workforce
Evan Spiegel, the boss of Snap, parent company of the popular messaging application Snapchat, announced in August 2022 a restructuring leading to the elimination of around 20% of the workforce, or more than 1,200 employees. These departures must take place within the framework of a broader reorganization and the cessation of several projects, such as Games (video games) or Pixy (miniature drone). Like the rest of tech companies, the social network is now caught up in the drop in advertising spending by advertisers on digital, in a difficult macroeconomic context.
Snapchat, which has more and more users, is still in trouble because it generates increasingly low revenues. The app ended the second quarter of 2022 with a net loss of $422 million, compared to $117 million at the same time a year earlier.