From Meta to Byju's: After Spike During Pandemic, Tech-Based Firms Laying Off People in Post Covid Era

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, on Wednesday confirmed the layoffs by the company and the decision to reduce the size of its team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of employees go. Meta’s layoff announcement comes after major IT and tech companies such as Twitter and BYJU’s also carried out mass layoffs in the last few weeks.

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. People predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended but things did not turn out that way.

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The global economy is facing a slowdown and there are multiple reasons for it. The tech industry is facing issues in the past few months, with most of the giants pausing their hiring plans, while some are being forced to lay off staff.

Here are the major companies that have fired thousands of their employees in the post-pandemic market:

Twitter

Elon Musk began firing Twitter employees right after the takeover. It began with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. After which the microblogging platform fired nearly half of its staff, which includes around 7,500 people. The company let go close to 90 per cent of its Indian staff from the marketing, communications, and engineering teams. The layoffs by Twitter have also prompted a class action lawsuit by the company’s former employees.

Read | BYJU’s Lays off 600 People as EdTech Space Shrinks in India

Meta

Facebook-parent Meta decided to reduce the size of their team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of their employees go. The layoffs are part of a plan to reduce costs at Meta following disappointing earnings and a drop in revenue. The staff reductions, part of the first major budget cut since the founding of Facebook in 2004, reflect a sharp slowdown in digital advertising revenue, an economy wobbling on the brink of recession, and Zuckerberg’s heavy investment in a speculative virtual-reality push called the metaverse.

BYJU’s

At Byju’s, around 2,500 layoffs have been made, which has reduced the EdTech company’s workforce by 5 percent. The company has backed the reason for layoffs to be the result of redundancies and duplication of roles. Experts state that it is a cost-cutting measure adopted by the company amid the challenging funding environment.

Microsoft

With the slowing PC sales, Microsoft is another tech company that decided to cut its work staff. In July, Microsoft laid off 1 per cent of its employees, and last month, the company had to cull its staff strength further. The recent firing was related to the slowdown in the software division at Microsoft.

Unacademy

Edtech firm Unacademy has laid off 350 employees, or 10 per cent of its total workforce of 3,500, to cut costs and boost profitability, according to a moneycontrol report quoting an internal letter written by its co-founder and CEO Gaurab Munjal to the employees. In April also, Unacademy laid off nearly 1,000 employees to focus on profitability and cut costs amid the pandemic. In July, with an eye on profitability and the aim to go public in two years, Unacademy founders took a salary cut.

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