iRobot, the maker of Roomba, announced plans this week to cut nearly a third of its workforce, marking the company’s latest round of layoffs and the latest in a string corporate job cuts this year that have rocked the tech industry, including at Microsoft, Amazon and eBay.
iRobot, the maker of Roomba, cut hundreds of employees this week.
iRobot said Monday it will cut roughly 350 jobs, after calling off plans for an acquisition by Amazon originally valued at $1.7 billion—iRobot’s latest layoffs come after the Massachusetts-based company slashed 140 employees in August 2022.
After cutting a whopping 10,000 employees last winter, Microsoft announced plans last week to cut another 1,900 positions (roughly 8% of its workforce) in its videogame divisions—including at Xbox and Activision Blizzard, the videogame company Microsoft acquired in a massive $68.7 billion deal late last year—in an effort to promote a “sustainable cost structure,” according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer.
Online retailer eBay—which cut 500 employees last February—reduced its headcount by 1,000 employees (roughly 9% of its workforce), with CEO Jamie Iannone lamenting in a blog post that the company’s expenses “outpaced the growth of our business.”
San Francisco tech giant Salesforce will also conduct a major layoff affecting roughly 700 employees, or 1% of its workforce, sources told the Wall Street Journal, just over a year after the company cut 7,900 employees, which CEO Marc Benioff attributed to a “challenging” economic environment.
After cutting 1,750 employees last year, Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah told employees earlier this month that the company will slash 1,650 jobs in an effort to “position the company both now and over the long term,” one week after Shah urged employees to work “long hours.”
Macy’s also laid out plans this week to cut 2,350 jobs and close five department stores, affecting roughly 13% of its corporate staff and 3.5% of its total workforce, according to an internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
Google plans to cut employees across its global advertising and sales teams, the company confirmed in a statement to Forbes, one week after it laid off “hundreds” more employees across several divisions, including its engineering and hardware teams, as well as employees developing its voice-operated virtual assistant, Google Assistant, according to an internal email obtained by the New York Times and Semafor.
Twitch, a live streaming site owned by Amazon, announced plans to cut 35% of its staff (roughly 500 employees), CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post last Wednesday, saying Twitch has “work to do to rightsize” the company, calling it “meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business,” while Amazon’s audiobook division Audible also conducted a round of cuts affecting 100 employees.
That same day, Amazon announced plans to cut “several hundred” employees at its Prime Video and MGM Studios divisions, following a review of “nearly every aspect” of the company’s business operations, according to a memo obtained by Forbes from Mike Hopkins, the senior vice president of Prime Video.
Language learning app Duolingo earlier this month slashed 10% of its contract employees (it’s not immediately clear how many workers this affects), as the company pivots toward relying on artificial intelligence for content generation, multiple outlets reported, though the company said none of its full-time employees would be affected by the layoffs.
Discord CEO Jason Citron announced the platform will cut 17% of its workforce (roughly 170 employees) to “sharpen [its] focus and improve the way [it] work[s] together to bring more agility” to the company, The Verge reported.
Video game software developer Unity Software announced in a regulatory filing it will cut one-quarter of its staff (roughly 1,800 jobs) as part of a restructuring plan to “position itself for long-term and profitable growth.”
While tech companies lean into layoffs this month, the total number of cuts pales in comparison to the number of employees who lost their jobs last January. Online tracker Layoffs.fyi found 37 tech companies made layoffs so far this month, a far cry from the 278 companies that cut their head counts last January.
More than 305,000. That’s how many employees lost their jobs in major U.S. layoffs last year, according to Forbes’ layoff tracker, which included layoffs affecting 100 or more jobs. The biggest of those cuts came in July, when now-bankrupt trucking company Yellow laid off all 30,000 of its employees. Preceding Yellow Corporation were a pack of tech and manufacturing companies announcing layoffs, including Amazon, which announced plans in January 2023 to cut 8,000 employees amid an “uncertain economy,” and laid off another 9,000 workers in November, after cutting 10,000 jobs in late 2022. Google parent Alphabet cut another 12,000 employees in January 2023 due to what CEO Sundar Pichai called “tough choices,” while Meta and Microsoft each laid off 10,000 positions that same month (Meta cut another 6,000 employees two months later).
Banking giant Citigroup announced Friday it will cut 20,000 employees over the next two years, according to a statement from CFO Mark Mason, following a $1.8 billion fourth quarter net loss, the bank’s worst quarter in 15 years. Citigroup’s cuts follow a string of layoffs at major U.S. banks, following investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which cut 4,000 employees last year, and JPMorgan Chase, which let go of 1,000 employees in May.
Over 305,000 Laid Off In Major U.S. Cuts This Year—Here Are The Biggest (Forbes)
2023 Layoff Tracker: Nike Will Reportedly Cut ‘Hundreds’ Of Employees (Forbes)
Amazon Is Laying Off Hundreds Of Twitch, Prime Video And MGM Studios Employees (Forbes)