Tech layoffs balloon in January as Wall Street rally lifts Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft to records
Tech stocks on display at the Nasdaq.
Peter Kramer | CNBC
The S&P 500 is trading at a record and the Nasdaq is at its highest in two years. Alphabet shares reached a new pinnacle on Thursday, as did Meta and Microsoft, which ran past $3 trillion in market cap.
Don’t tell that to the bosses.
While Wall Street cheers on Silicon Valley, tech companies are downsizing at an accelerating clip. So far in January, some 23,670 workers have been laid off from 85 tech companies, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. That’s the most since March, when almost 38,000 people in the industry were shown the exits.
Activity picked up this week with SAP announcing job changes or layoffs for 8,000 employees and Microsoft cutting 1,900 positions in its gaming division. Additionally, high-valued fintech startup Brex laid off 20% of its staff and eBay slashed 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its full-time workforce. Jamie Iannone, eBay’s CEO, told employees in a memo that, “We need to better organize our teams for speed — allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together, and help us make decisions more quickly.”
Earlier in the month, Google confirmed that it cut several hundred jobs across the company, and Amazon has eliminated hundreds of positions spanning its Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions. Unity said it’s cutting about 25% of its staff, and Discord, which offers a popular messaging service used by gamers, is shedding 17% of its workforce.
The swarm of activity comes ahead of a barrage of tech earnings next week, when Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all scheduled to report quarterly results. Investors lauded the cost-cutting measures that companies put in place last year in response to rising inflation, interest rates hikes, recession concerns and a brutal market downturn in 2022. Even with an improving economic outlook, the thriftiness continues.
Layoffs peaked in January of last year, when 277 technology companies cut almost 90,000 jobs, as the tech industry was forced to reckon with the end of a more than decade-long bull market. Most of the rightsizing efforts took place in the first quarter of 2023, and the number of cuts proceeded to decline each month through September, before ticking up toward the end of the year.
One explanation for the January surge as companies budget for the year ahead: They’ve learned they can do more with less.
At Meta, in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s words, 2023 was the “year of efficiency,” and the stock jumped almost 200% alongside 20,000 job cuts. Across the industry, artificial intelligence was the rallying cry as new generative AI technologies showed what was possible in automating customer service, booking travel and creating marketing campaigns.
‘Reposition themselves for AI’
The AI hype raised concerns in many corners of the economy about the declining need for human labor as technology gets smarter. But it’s having a more immediate impact on the workforce. AI demand is so great that some tech companies are cutting headcount in parts of the business to invest more heavily in developing AI products.
“These companies, in general, are reducing numbers of employees associated with product lines or divisions that have not been successful because they want to reposition themselves for AI,” said Art Zeile, CEO of DHI group, which owns the tech recruiting platform Dice.
Zeile was quick to point out that the cuts we’re seeing this January are far below the numbers from a year prior, adding that “it’s not the kind of news that it was earlier.”
Company execs choose different verbiage to convey their downsizing message to employees and investors, but the through line is that they’re trying to become more focused.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said his company’s layoffs were part of a larger “execution plan” that would reduce “areas of overlap,” a little more than three months after Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. SAP said its restructuring is designed to increase “focus on key strategic growth areas, in particular Business AI.”
Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, appears at the Political Opening of the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, on Aug. 23, 2023.
Franziska Krug | German Select | Getty Images
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a memo titled “2024 priorities and the year ahead” that, “we have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” and that “to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.” And at Amazon’s Audible unit, CEO Bob Carrigan said “getting leaner and more efficient” is the way the company needs to operate for the “foreseeable future.”
Nigel Vaz, CEO of consulting firm Publicis Sapient, told CNBC that some companies are probably looking at the boon that Meta and Salesforce got after their hefty cost-cutting measures last year.
Salesforce cut about 10% of its workforce in January 2023, and the stock ended up nearly doubling for the year, its best performance since 2009. Following Meta’s announced cuts, the company’s shares had their best year since Facebook debuted on the Nasdaq in 2012.
“I look at Meta and Salesforce as only two examples of companies that needed the impetus,” Vaz said. “The minute they got the impetus, then demonstrated what happens when you act with edge on stuff that you probably knew you needed to do.”
Not just tech
The layoffs aren’t limited to the tech industry. Embattled bank Citigroup said earlier this month that it was cutting 10% of its workforce. And on Thursday Levi Strauss said it will lay off at least 10% of its global corporate workforce as part of a restructuring. Paramount became the latest media brand to announce cuts, with CEO Bob Bakish saying on Thursday the business needs to “operate as a leaner company and spend less.”
Within tech, a wide variety of companies, big and small and spanning the consumer and enterprise markets, are eliminating jobs.
At the large publicly traded companies, there’s an “intense focus” on profitability, margins and cost cutting, said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, which tracks trends across the tech sector. But, he added, there’s an “enormous base” of small and mid-sized tech companies across the U.S., and that in some cases contractors, freelancers and overseas workers are being hit particularly hard.
However, Herbert echoed Zeile in noting that there’s not enough data to get too panicked about the activity in January.
“There’s a lot of nuance to the data, so we always want to be a little bit careful not to read too much into it,” Herbert said. “We don’t want to ever get too hung up on just one month of data, or even two months of data.”
While investors will get a clearer picture on the near-term outlook for business and consumer spending in tech earnings announcements next week, the latest macroeconomic reports provide some reasons for optimism.
The economy grew at a faster-than-expected pace in the fourth quarter, and inflation cooled over that stretch, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
Gross domestic product increased at a 3.3% annualized rate in the quarter, topping the Wall Street consensus estimate for a gain of 2%. Meanwhile, consumer prices rose 2.7% on annual basis in the quarter, down from 5.9% a year ago. Inflation has been easing from its pandemic-era peak in mid-2022.
The market has been rallying, as investors see those key numbers leading to the likelihood of Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2024 after the central bank lifted its benchmark rate 11 times in less than two years to fight inflation.
Vaz said many corporate leaders are optimistic over “inflation actually meaningfully starting to come down” at the same time that “spending is essentially coming back in so many sectors.”
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom, Annie Palmer and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.
Ben Kriemann | Getty Images
Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.
Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.
There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.
Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.
Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.
In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.
Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.
CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.
WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers
Technology
IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
NYSE
For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.
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