- PayPal employees are the latest tech workers to be hit by a wave of layoffs.
- Over the past few weeks, layoffs have expanded outside of tech, media, and finance as Dow, 3M, and Stitch Fix announce cuts.
- See the full list of layoffs so far in 2023.
A wave of layoffs that hit dozens of US companies toward the end of 2022 shows no sign of slowing down into 2023.
On Tuesday, fintech giant PayPal announced that it would be cutting 2,000 employees, which is around 7% of the company’s total workforce.
In a statement announcing the layoffs on PayPal’s website, CEO and president Dan Schulman noted that the reductions will take place over the following weeks “with some organizations impacted more than others.”
PayPal is one among several major corporations that have already made significant cuts in the new year: Fellow tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, and finance behemoths, like Goldman Sachs, announced massive layoffs in the first weeks of 2023 amid a continued economic downturn and stagnating sales.
The downsizing followed significant reductions at companies including Twitter and Meta late last year.
The layoffs have primarily affected the tech sector, which is now hemorrhaging employees at a faster rate than at any point during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to data cited by the Journal from Layoffs.fyi, a site tracking layoffs since the start of the pandemic, tech companies slashed more than 150,000 in 2022 alone — compared to 80,000 in 2020 and 15,000 in 2021.
The wave of mass layoffs is now expanding beyond tech and into economic bellwethers: industrial company 3M, and material company Dow recently announced cuts.
Here are the notable examples so far in 2023: