Q1 of 2023: The most Tech Layoffs in history
More layoffs during the last 40 days than during the entire Dot Com Bubble Burst of 1999/2000.
No matter how you slice it, we are now seeing the largest number of layoffs in the history of the computer industry — with numbers that are blowing the Dot Com Bubble Burst out of the water.
Back in mid-January I reported on the continuing trend of major layoffs at Tech companies — and predicted that this trend would continue (and escalate significantly) well into 2023.
The Tech Correction of 2022 / 2023
At that time (January 18th), there had been 37,526 employees laid off from Tech companies year-to-date (all in just 18 days). An average of over 2,000 jobs lost per day.
It is now February 9th — just 40 days into 2023 — and we are now at 100,746 total employees laid off from Tech companies. A daily average of 2,518 employees laid off since the start of the year.
Which means that Q1 of 2023 is already breaking records as as the most layoffs in computer history.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.
Dot Com Bubble? Pshh. Hold my beer.
Between December of 1999 and January of 2001 (14 months) — during the height of the Dot Com Bubble Burst — we saw a total of 54,343 employees laid off (or lose their jobs due to Tech companies going out of business).
This was, at the time, considered to be catastrophic. And, in oh-so-many ways, it was.
Want to really freak out?
The current total of Tech layoffs over the last 13 months… is now 260,532. Almost 5 times the number of jobs lost during the Dot Com Bubble Burst. Here’s a chart to drive that home.
Where this goes from here is anybodies guess… but it appears to be accelerating.
Repeat: This is not slowing down.
Q4 of 2022 (last quarter) was an all-time record for Tech layoffs — clocking in at well over 75,000 (more than over a year of the Dot Com Burst). And Q1 of 2023 has already blown well past that record — by hitting over 100,000.
And this Quarter is not even half way over yet.
Think about the following for a moment:
If the current trend continues, we stand a real chance of seeing over 200,000 layoffs by the end of this quarter.
More jobs have been lost in the last month… than were lost in well over a year of Dot Com Bubble layoffs.
Yahoo, GitLab, GoDaddy, Zoom, eBay, & Dell have all announced layoffs in the last 3 days alone.
While I continue to believe that this was a long-overdue correction — one with some significant long-term benefits — there can be no doubt that this many lost jobs, all at once, is an incredibly devastating event. On an almost incomprehensible scale.
If we consider the lost jobs during the Dot Com Bubble Burst to be “catastrophic”… what does that make the Tech Correction of 2022 / 2023?
The reality is… we have never seen anything like this in the computer industry before. This is uncharted territory.
Data for 1999 - 2001 layoff numbers were sourced from Challenger data from those years, and cross checked with articles from the New York Times, Computer World, and CNN from 2000 and 2001.
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