Recent high-profile tech retrenchments

TikTok's Feb 20 culling of employees handling trust and safety continues a trend of technology firms laying off workers in recent years.

- Aqil Hamzah

Spurred by consumers staying at home and being more reliant on technology to interact online during the Covid-19 pandemic, many big technology companies went on a hiring spree.

But as growth petered out, firms have changed course, with hundreds of thousands of employees being given the pink slip since 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs in the technology industry.

In 2024, 548 technology firms terminated 152,404 employees.

In the first two months of 2025, some 13,353 people in the industry have already been laid off.

Here are five high-profile tech layoffs that were initiated over the past year.

META, FEBRUARY 2025

A leaked memo by Meta's vice-president of human resources Janelle Gale showed that about 3,600 employees, or about 5 percent of its workforce, would lose their jobs from Feb 10.