Amazon.com Inc. is laying off a total of 18,000 people, including 143 in the Los Angeles area. This represents about 6% of the company’s workforce.
The e-commerce company is one of a wave of cuts by technology companies. Crowdsourcing site Layoffs.fyi, which has tracked tech layoffs since the pandemic began, reports that about 150,000 tech workers nationwide lost their jobs last year.
Santa Monica-based Snap Inc. was one of many tech companies to lay off employees last year. A social media company has cut about 20% of its workforce as part of a restructuring plan. As we enter the new year, we continue to reduce staff. Last month, Microsoft CEO Satiana Della announced that the company would lay off 10,000 of his employees. On January 20, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced it would lay off 12,000 jobs. And in early January, Burbank-based HR tech firm CareerArc announced through LinkedIn that it was laying off staff.
“Today has been a tough day. Very smart and talented people have lost their jobs as the company restructured,” the company said in a post.
Tech companies, large and small, continued to hire during the pandemic. Amid lockdowns, people were forced to upgrade their home tech hardware to work from home, e-commerce shopping hit a record high, and tech revenues soared. With inflation and rising interest rates, the economic outlook for tech companies isn’t as bright now as it was then.
As the technology industry changes and companies move to new technologies such as artificial intelligence, they are forced to reorganize their resources to make room for innovation.
In a blog post titled “Focusing on Short-Term and Long-Term Opportunities,” Nadella wrote: the following. We also know that organizations in every industry and region are paying attention as some parts of the world are in recession and others are expected to be. ”