853 IT Companies Have Fired 1.3 Lakh Employees In 2022; 2.3 Lakh Employees Fired Since Covid

Amid the global meltdown, more and more companies across the spectrum sacked employees.

So far, almost 853 tech companies worldwide have laid off about 137,492 employees and the tally is only going north amid recession fears.

Tech Companies Affected By Global Meltdown

To be specific, 1,388 tech companies have fired a total of 233,483 employees since the onset of Covid-19, as per the data from layoffs.fyi which is a crowdsourced database of tech layoffs.

It can not be denied that 2022 has been the worst for the tech sector.

As of mid-November, more than 73,000 workers in the US tech sector have been laid off in mass-level job cuts.

These changes led by companies including Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Netflix, Cisco, Roku, and others.

Crunchbase indicates that Robinhood, Glossier, and Better are just a few of the tech companies that have notably trimmed their headcount in 2022.

It appears that big Tech giants such as Amazon and PC and printer major HP Inc have joined the global layoff season.

They were set to lay off more than 10,000 and up to 6,000 employees in the coming days, respectively.

It doesn’t end here as the ecommerce major Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy has warned employees that there will be more layoffs at the company in early 2023 “as leaders continue to make adjustments”.

These massive job cuts have affected several divisions across the globe.

It has especially hit the Alexa virtual assistant business as it is set to lose $10 billion this year as the voice assistant never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream.

Other tech giants like Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is reportedly gearing up to lay off about 10,000 “poor performing” employees, or 6 percent of its workforce.

Reportedly, Google plans to ease out 10,000 employees through a new ranking and performance improvement plan.

Edtech Domain Affected In Indian 

The slow down has massively affected the edtech domain in India.

So far, around 16,000 employees have been asked to go by about 44 startups, led by edtech companies like BYJU’S, Unacademy, and Vedantu, as VC funding dried up.

The tech startups and unicorns have been affected greatly as they laid off employees in India including Ola, Cars24, Meesho, LEAD, MPL, Innovaccer, Udaan and more.

In the meantime, thousands of contractual employees have also been let go.

Thus making 2022 the harshest year for workers in the technology sector.

Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy has warned that the startup ecosystem’s funding winter could last another 12 to 18 months.

So, the industry may face “a lot of turmoil and volatility”.

In the last 12 months, Indian startups are going through steep hiring cuts and the hiring of permanent employees has dipped by a significant 61 percent, as per the annual insights report by RazorpayX Payroll, which is the business banking platform of Razorpay.

The latest PwC India report indicates that only two startups in India, Shiprocket and OneCard, attained unicorn status (valuation $1 billion and above) in the July-September period.