Tech Layoffs Reach 132,000 8 Months Into 2024

This year is shaping up to be a painful one for people working in tech.

As Seeking Alpha noted in a report Sunday (Aug. 18), layoffs in the tech space accelerated this month, with Cisco and Intel announcing the elimination of close to 21,000 jobs.

Cisco last week said it was embarking on a restructuring plan which involves cutting 7% of its global staff. This was the second round of mass layoffs at the company, which announced in February that it was slashing 4,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, Intel said earlier this month it was cutting around 15,000 employees, or 15% of its global staff of 110,000.

“Simply put, we must align our cost structure with our new operating model and fundamentally change the way we operate,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a note to employees.

“Our revenues have not grown as expected — and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both — particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

Layoffs.fyi, a tracker that monitors job cuts in the tech sector, shows that — as of Sunday — the industry had cut more than 132,000 jobs at 404 companies.

The Seeking Alpha report notes that at this rate layoffs should exceed the 165,269 job cuts in the tech sector in 2022, while falling short of last year’s total of 264,220. The layoffs this year have hit hardware companies particularly hard. For example, the tracker found just 3,605 layoffs in hardware companies in 2022 and 24,459 in all of 2023. But less than eight full months into this year, those companies have already made up 24,706 layoffs.

Other companies cutting jobs this year include Microsoft, which had planned to cut up to 1,500 workers from its Azure cloud operations, and Apple, which recently laid off 614 employees following its decision to shutter its connected car and smartwatch projects.

Meta has cut 50 vice president positions, following a much wider spate of layoffs last year and in 2022, with 21,000 jobs eliminated. Among the other tech companies cutting jobs this year include PayPal, Snap and eBay.