Okta, Zoom Cut Hundreds Of Jobs—Here Are 2024’s Tech Layoffs

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the identity management company will reduce its head count by roughly 400 employees (7% of its workforce), acknowledging the “reality is that costs are still too high.”

Zoom, whose popularity exploded as remote meetings took off during the Covid-19 pandemic, will cut 150 employees, sources told Bloomberg, a reduction of less than 2% of its workforce and its second round of layoffs in under a year, after the company let go of another 15% of its workforce last February—Zoom told Forbes the company “regularly evaluate[s]” its teams and is “rescoping roles to add capabilities and continue to hire in critical areas.”

Proofpoint, the provider of email and data security tools, said it expects to cut 280 employees, saying the layoffs are part of a “forward-looking” strategy aimed at positioning the company “for continued and long-term success.”

Block, a payment firm headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, implemented a round of layoffs the company announced late last year, affecting a targeted 1,000 of the company’s roughly 13,000 employees, multiple outlets reported.

PayPal plans to reduce its head count by 2,500 employees over the next 12 months, according to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, reducing the San-Francisco-Bay-area firm’s staff by roughly 9% in an effort to “right-size” the company.

iRobot said Monday it will cut roughly 350 jobs, after calling off plans for an acquisition by Amazon originally valued at $1.7 billion—iRobot’s latest layoffs come after the Massachusetts-based company slashed 140 employees in August 2022.

After cutting a whopping 10,000 employees last winter, Microsoft announced plans last week to cut another 1,900 positions (roughly 8% of its workforce) in its videogame divisions—including at Xbox and Activision Blizzard, the videogame company Microsoft acquired in a massive $68.7 billion deal late last year—in an effort to promote a “sustainable cost structure,” according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer.

Online retailer eBay—which cut 500 employees last February—reduced its headcount by 1,000 employees (roughly 9% of its workforce), with CEO Jamie Iannone lamenting in a blog post that the company’s expenses “outpaced the growth of our business.”

San Francisco tech giant Salesforce will also conduct a major layoff affecting roughly 700 employees, or 1% of its workforce, sources told the Wall Street Journal, just over a year after the company cut 7,900 employees, which CEO Marc Benioff attributed to a “challenging” economic environment.

After cutting 1,750 employees last year, Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah told employees earlier this month that the company will slash 1,650 jobs in an effort to “position the company both now and over the long term,” one week after Shah urged employees to work “long hours.”

Macy’s also laid out plans this week to cut 2,350 jobs and close five department stores, affecting roughly 13% of its corporate staff and 3.5% of its total workforce, according to an internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

Google plans to cut employees across its global advertising and sales teams, the company confirmed in a statement to Forbes, one week after it laid off “hundreds” more employees across several divisions, including its engineering and hardware teams, as well as employees developing its voice-operated virtual assistant, Google Assistant, according to an internal email obtained by the New York Times and Semafor.

Twitch, a live streaming site owned by Amazon, announced plans to cut 35% of its staff (roughly 500 employees), CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post last Wednesday, saying Twitch has “work to do to rightsize” the company, calling it “meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business,” while Amazon’s audiobook division Audible also conducted a round of cuts affecting 100 employees.

That same day, Amazon announced plans to cut “several hundred” employees at its Prime Video and MGM Studios divisions, following a review of “nearly every aspect” of the company’s business operations, according to a memo obtained by Forbes from Mike Hopkins, the senior vice president of Prime Video.

Language learning app Duolingo earlier this month slashed 10% of its contract employees (it’s not immediately clear how many workers this affects), as the company pivots toward relying on artificial intelligence for content generation, multiple outlets reported, though the company said none of its full-time employees would be affected by the layoffs.

Discord CEO Jason Citron announced the platform will cut 17% of its workforce (roughly 170 employees) to “sharpen [its] focus and improve the way [it] work[s] together to bring more agility” to the company, The Verge reported.

Video game software developer Unity Software announced in a regulatory filing it will cut one-quarter of its staff (roughly 1,800 jobs) as part of a restructuring plan to “position itself for long-term and profitable growth.”