Last November, with tech layoff announcements seemingly coming faster and faster every day, IEEE Spectrum asked Intellizence, an AI startup that provides market intelligence services for corporate clients, to dig through the news to assemble actual data. Though not perfectly comprehensive, this data gave us a decent snapshot on what was going on, but we couldn’t tell whether that wave represented a bad news peak or just the beginning of a tsunami. (Intellizence gathered this data from WARN filings, news reports, and press releases, using AI-based tools to extract key details.)
We went back to Intellizence this month for an update. Looking at these latest numbers, it’s clear that in last November, the wave of bad news for tech professionals was just getting started. After a dip in layoff announcements in December (Happy holidays, y’all!), the number of tech company employees facing pink slips in January was nearly double the November spike. Since then, the pace of layoffs has leveled off some, but the numbers are still high.
Here’s what the data show to date. January was a brutal month, with tech companies announcing that more than 100,000 positions were being cut. Since then, more than 70,000-plus tech company employees have been given notice.
Since last August, when the tech downturn became apparent, more than a quarter of a million U.S. tech jobs have disappeared, according to Intellizence’s analysis. The crunch hit professionals at companies big and small, but the most dramatic news came from Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, which together accounted for more than 75,000 layoffs.
