More than 15,000 tech workers lost their jobs worldwide in May, report says

More than 15,000 people working in the technology sector lost their jobs in May around the world, as global macroeconomic factors hit businesses, especially startups.

According to layoff aggregator layoffs.fyi, more than 15,000 tech workers lost their jobs this month, TechCrunch reports.

Since March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic started, 1.25 lakh employees have been laid off from around 718 startups globally.

Tech companies are facing multiple issues such as rising inflation, fear of recession, Russian-Ukrainian war.

Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter publicly announced the hiring freeze, while Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, confirmed it was slowing hiring as it missed revenue targets.

On Thursday, enterprise e-commerce platform Vtex announced that it would lay off 193 employees.

PayPal has laid off dozens of employees from its San Jose headquarters in the United States.

Two of the biggest instant grocery apps, Getir and Gorillas, announced layoffs this week. Turkish company Getir said it planned to cut its global workforce by 14% and Gorillas said it was making the “extremely difficult decision” to lay off around 300 of its employees.

Grocery delivery startup Instacart is also slowing hiring.

“We’ve hired over 1,500 people over the past year and nearly doubled the size of our engineering teams. As part of our second half planning, we are slowing our hiring to focus on our most important priorities and continue to drive profitable growth. Instacart said in a statement.

In India, more than 6,000 people have been laid off in the name of ‘restructuring’ and ‘cost cutting’ as startups and unicorns shut down underperforming verticals, cut marketing spend and freeze new hires.

The fete of successful startups that began during the pandemic years appears to be over as thousands of people have been laid off from startups ranging from edtech to e-commerce and health tech.

The situation is set to worsen with the impending recession and the drying up of funding.

–IANS

na/shb/

(Only the title and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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