Technology companies are starting 2024 by laying off thousands of workers, continuing a trend of job cuts in 2022 and 2023.
Nearly 11,000 employees were laid off in the first month of 2024, according to Layoffs.fyi, a continuation of cuts that began in 2022.
The latest wave of job cuts is the technology companies “trying to overcorrect for their overhiring during the pandemic,” Layoffs.fyi creator Roger Lee told Yahoo Finance. The companies were not prepared for the high-interest-rate economy and the declining interest in tech companies, Lee said, which meant that the firms underestimated the number of cuts they had to make to survive.
Here are the latest technology companies to lay off their staff.
Riot Games
Riot, best known for developing the popular esports team game League of Legends, announced on Monday that it was laying off more than 500 of its staff worldwide — or 11% of its total workforce. The company announced the decision in a blog post without informing staff, leaving fans and staffers surprised by the decision.
“Some of the significant investments we’ve made aren’t paying off the way we expected them to,” CEO Dylan Jadeja said in his post. The cuts were not to appease investors, Jadeja said, but to “focus our business and center our efforts on the things that drive the most player value — the things that are truly worth players’ time.”
The search engine giant announced that it was laying off “hundreds” of employees from Google’s advertising and sales team due to “restructuring” and decisions made regarding how the team is operated. It also cut hundreds of employees on Jan. 11 from the Google Assistant Division and the team that helps the company develop hardware such as Pixel phones and Nest smart home devices.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this was just the start and that more layoffs were coming throughout 2024. “We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai wrote in a memo. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.” These goals likely include Google’s expanding interest in generative artificial intelligence.
These additional job cuts arrived after Google cut more than 12,000 jobs from the company in 2023.
Discord
The chat server hosting service announced in a Jan. 11 memo that it was laying off 170 of its employees — or 17% of its staff. The company’s staff count had grown too quickly over the last few years, CEO Jason Citron wrote, and these job cuts were meant to “sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.”
Discord initially launched as a server-based chat service for gamers in 2015, but it became a common tool for various online communities. It has grown to the point that the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Citron to testify on how it is handling teenage mental health.
Twitch
The livestreaming platform Twitch announced on Jan. 9 that it was laying off 500 employees, or 35% of its staff, as it struggles to achieve profitability. The Amazon-owned company has labored for years to profit from hosting several video game and personality streamers on its platform.
“Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run, and throughout the year, we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” CEO Dan Clancy wrote. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.”
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Amazon
The retail giant announced that it was laying off “several hundreds” of its employees from its Prime Video division and MGM Studios.
The job cuts were intended to “reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact,” Mike Hopkins, the senior vice president of Prime Video, told employees. The layoffs arrived more than a year after Amazon finalized its acquisition of MGM Studios for $8.5 billion in 2022.
