From “a day in my life” vlogs to “I just got laid off” confessionals, tech layoffs have quietly become a genre of their own online, except the numbers behind the trend are anything but the stuff for virality.
In the entirety of 2025 alone, at least 127,000 US tech workers were laid off, following 95,667 cuts in 2024 and more than 191,000 in 2023. Even big tech firms conventionally known to be stable are left with no immunity. From 2025 until now companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel are all about reducing the workforce and accordingly have laid off 15,347, 30,284, 27,058 respectively.
And 2026? It is not exactly turning out to be a comeback arc, with over 52,000 jobs having already been cut in the first three months, with March alone bearing witness to 18,720 layoffs, marking a 40% jump year-over-year. Some cuts have been incremental; others have been sweeping through: Block trimmed down a staggering 40% of its workforce, while Oracle reportedly laid off tens of thousands globally.
The AI restack
If layoffs once signaled downturns, today they are starting to look more like redesigns. By January 2026, the highest record for tech job cuts since 2009 was already set in stone through the realization of 22,291 layoffs as companies doubled down on automation.
AI isn’t just a catchphrase in this context, here it’s more of a headcount strategy. In 2025, AI adoption was directly responsible for around 55,000 layoffs and to make things worse about 32% of companies are anticipating to follow suit and shrink their workforce because of it. Beyond layoffs, the onset of the AI boom is even changing the structure of companies within. Instead of sprawling teams, AI-first startups are scaling with just 10 to 50 employees, and completely relying on automation to do the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, the labor market is being affected by this shift and is feeling the repercussion in real time even as the broader economy added a lay up of 178,000. And for those caught in the cuts, the aftermath isn’t kind either in fact the fallout lingers beyond the layoff post. Goldman Sachs estimates displaced tech employees take about one month longer to find new roles, and when they do it's often by settling for jobs that pay over 3% less.
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