Economic uncertainty, elevated interest rates, and the accelerating adoption of automation and artificial intelligence combined have made 2025 one of the most disruptive years for the global technology workforce on record. Entire job functions, not just individual roles, were eliminated as companies restructured their operations to focus on efficiency, profitability, and AI-driven productivity.
In response to this trend, the team at RationalFX investigated the wave of layoffs in the technology sector, analysing the number of job cuts that have occurred throughout 2025. Based on figures from several sources, including TrueUp, TechCrunch, and multiple state WARN databases, we identified the companies with the most significant workforce reductions. In total, 244,851 tech jobs were cut globally in 2025, marking another year of sustained downsizing following the post-pandemic correction that began in 2022.
American technology companies were responsible for the overwhelming majority of job losses in 2025. U.S.-headquartered companies accounted for approximately 69.7% of all global tech layoffs, resulting in the loss of more than 170,000 employees across both domestic and offshore operations.
The single largest contributor was Intel. Employing roughly 109,000 people at the end of 2024, the semiconductor giant announced plans to reduce its headcount to around 75,000 by the end of 2025. This represents a workforce reduction of approximately 34,000 roles, or 31% of its total staff, as the company struggled with declining revenues, mounting losses, and intensifying competition.
Other major U.S. tech companies that carried out large-scale layoffs throughout the year include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Salesforce, IBM, and HP, demonstrating how deeply entrenched cost-cutting became across the sector among the world’s most valuable corporations.
Outside the United States, India recorded the second-highest number of tech layoffs globally. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest IT services firm, announced 12,000 job cuts, bringing India’s total to over 19,000 layoffs in 2025.
Japan followed closely with 11,608 total tech layoffs, driven primarily by Panasonic’s 4% workforce reduction, affecting roughly 10,000 employees, aimed at boosting profitability and streamlining operations.
In Europe, Ireland emerged as the most heavily affected country after Accenture revealed plans to cut 11,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring tied to its AI strategy. Earlier in the year, Stripe eliminated approximately 300 roles, while Flutter Entertainment cut around 200 positions, bringing Ireland’s total to roughly 11,500 layoffs.
Spain joined the list of hardest-hit countries late in the year after telecommunications giant Telefónica announced it would eliminate 7,000 jobs across its European operations, further highlighting the breadth of restructuring across the continent.
Tech Companies Boosted Profits While Trimming Global Workforces
One of the defining themes of 2025 was the growing disconnect between financial performance and workforce stability.
Microsoft reported $77.7 billion in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 (ending 30 September 2025), an 18% year-on-year increase, alongside $27.7 billion in net income, up 12%. Despite this, the company eliminated over 19,000 jobs during 2025, including senior management roles and significant cuts within its Xbox division. Phil Spencer, Xbox’s CEO, framed the changes as part of a broader effort to streamline the business, remove layers of management, and redirect resources toward growth areas such as AI and cloud services.
Meta followed a similar path. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, the company generated $51.24 billion in revenue, a 26% increase compared with the same quarter last year, and $2.71 billion in net income, despite a $15.93 billion one-time tax charge. Meta’s operating income rose to $20.54 billion, with an operating margin of 40%, down from 43% a year ago, while total costs jumped 32% due largely to the rapid expansion of its AI infrastructure. Even as it invested heavily in AI, including $14.3 billion in June for a 49% stake in Scale AI, the company has laid off at least 4,320 employees since the start of 2025, highlighting the tension between workforce reductions and major growth investments.
AI & Automation Eliminated Thousands of Positions
Artificial intelligence and automation were among the most frequently cited drivers of layoffs in 2025. While some companies focused on retraining employees, many opted instead to replace roles entirely, particularly in data processing, customer support, HR, and administrative functions.
Amazon, the world’s largest retailer and one of the largest tech companies in the U.S., exemplified this trend. On October 28, Amazon confirmed 14,000 job cuts, saying the company was now focusing on AI and adapting to “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet”, as expressed in a memo to employees. Of the 20 thousand or so layoffs at the company this year, these 14 thousand are directly linked to AI adoption and making the corporate structure “leaner”.
Hospitality giant Marriott International and Dutch banking corporation ING and just two of the dozens of big players who are now fully leveraging customer service chatbots, for instance. UK telecom BT said it would be cutting 55,000 jobs, with the number representing both hired employees and contractors by 2030. Around 10,000 roles will be filled by AI, while the company is currently focusing on expanding its fiber and 5G technologies, digitizing, and implementing AI. In its latest annual report, it said that 48,000 employees were already actively using AI productivity tools. By the end of March 2025, BT employed around 85,300 people, roughly 6,400 fewer than at the same time in 2024.
One of the massive waves of layoffs emerging as a result of automation and artificial intelligence tools, as well as the relocation of operations outside the United States, has been at IBM. The tech giant, which despite its long history in innovation and cutting-edge technology development, seems to be left behind in the race for generative AI. With roughly 9,000 layoffs this year, the Armonk-based company aims at streamlining its operations, cutting costs, and focusing new efforts on quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Professional services company Accenture has announced a sweeping reduction of 11,000 employees over just three months, a move closely tied to its strategic pivot towards artificial intelligence. The company is executing a US$865 million restructuring plan, which includes severance payouts and divestment of certain business units, to redeploy capital to AI-driven operations and improve operational efficiency. Around 550,000 of the company’s employees have already been trained in generative AI fundamentals, and the firm now employs 77,000 AI and data specialists, which is nearly double the number from two years ago.
HP announced in late 2025 that it would cut 6,000 roles, around 10% of its roughly 60,000-strong global workforce, as part of a wider restructuring to integrate artificial intelligence across its operations. The layoffs, expected to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2028, will primarily affect the company’s product development, internal operations, and customer support departments. Company leadership cited rising operating costs, weakening demand, and increasing pressure from U.S. trade regulations as key factors behind the decision to accelerate cost-cutting efforts.
Human resources and financial management software company Workday recently laid off 1,750 employees while investing in AI and hiring for AI-focused roles. Duolingo, the popular language learning app, has also reportedly replaced hundreds of positions with AI tools in a ‘strategic shift toward an “AI-first” approach, ’ announced by CEO Luis von Ahn in April. Following a huge backlash not just by employees but by customers online, he was forced to clarify that the company would not be laying off employees; rather, a person would be hired only if the AI cannot do the job it is tasked with properly. Over the past year and a half, Duolingo has eliminated hundreds of contractor positions.
Another notable example is Salesforce, which slashed its customer support workforce nearly in half thanks to AI. CEO Marc Benioff recently announced the company was able to reduce its customer support from 9,000 positions to around 5,000 by using AI agents. Chinese company Bytedance, the parent of TikTok, has also eliminated hundreds of roles, putting human jobs in the hands of AI. In early August, 150 employees from the company’s Trust and Safety Department team in Berlin were said to have received termination notices, prompting protests in front of the local office. As part of Bydance’s global shift to replace human moderation with artificial intelligence, another team of content moderators was later laid off in the United Kingdom. It is still unclear how many roles were slashed there, but it is assumed the number is close to that in Germany. Other major tech companies laying off human workers in favor of automation and AI are Cisco, Klarna, and Intuit.
Manufacturing and Legacy Tech Firms Lead Layoff Counts
Following last year’s 15,000 layoffs, Santa Clara-based semiconductor and computer components manufacturer Intel appears to be doubling down on job cuts in a bid to rein in costs. The company initially announced plans to reduce its workforce by as much as 20% by the end of 2025, a move unveiled shortly after a new CEO took the helm. Intel’s financial difficulties deepened throughout the year, with the company reporting a net loss of $821 million in the first quarter, followed by a further $2.9 billion loss in Q2. In total, Intel alone contributed nearly 34,000 layoffs, followed by Amazon with more than 20,000 job cuts and Microsoft with approximately 19,215.
In its largest-ever round of layoffs, Verizon announced its plans to cut 15,000 employees, or around 15% of its workforce, as part of its restructuring plan under the company’s new CEO, Dan Schulman. The move came amid slowing subscriber growth, intensifying competition from rivals such as AT&T and T-Mobile, and mounting pressure to streamline costs across the business. Much of the reduction will target non-union management roles, while around 180-200 company-owned retail stores will be franchised to reduce fixed costs.
India’s largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services, was among the tech giants announcing workforce reductions in July. The company, which is part of the massive business conglomerate Tata Group, said it would be cutting 12,000 jobs, mostly middle and senior-level positions. The move, which will affect roughly 2% of the company’s workforce until April 2026, is not just a result of AI implementation, according to TCS CEO K. Krithivasan; it is part of a larger transformation, aimed at making the company more “agile” and ready for the new technologies that are being constantly developed in the sector. Similar to many others, TCS needs employees with a different set of skills, skills that were not needed just a couple of years ago.
Similar to the rest of the businesses mentioned here, IBM, one of the oldest and largest technology companies in the United States, has faced increased operational costs, along with shifting demand and changing market conditions. Although the company has not revealed any details on the laid-off employees, it is believed that the restructuring affected mostly its HR department, as well as marketing teams and financial operations positions: all non-tech jobs that could at least partially be replaced by AI. IBM automated routine HR tasks such as drafting emails, analyzing spreadsheets, and managing internal queries.
Social media platform and communication company Meta has reduced the size of its workforce numerous times throughout 2025. A recent wave of layoffs sacked 600 employees across its artificial intelligence division, A.I. Superintelligence Labs, followed by another 100 workers in Reality Labs, the company’s augmented and virtual reality unit. In total, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has laid off at least 4,320 jobs since the beginning of the year.
Semiconductor manufacturing and design company STMicroelectronics initially announced plans to lay off 3,000 workers by 2027, but the number later climbed to 5,000. The company’s 2024 annual report reveals that they employ 11,500 in France and 12,700 in Italy. The Italian and French governments own a combined 27.5% share of STMicroelectronics, and there is currently a heavy push from both governments towards limiting the number of layoffs to 1,000 in Rome and the same amount in France. Media reports estimate that between 2,000 and 5,000 employees will lose their jobs by 2027.
Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt had long been struggling financially until, in March 2025, it was forced to file for bankruptcy and cease operations. With most battery production centred in China, Japan, and South Korea, Northvolt was founded as Europe’s answer to reducing its dependence on suppliers from other continents. However, following its collapse, at least 3,000 employees were said to be left jobless, including at Northvolt’s massive factory in Skellefteå.
California and Silicon Valley Remain the Epicentre of U.S. Tech Layoffs
As expected from the state’s high concentration of technological companies, California has spearheaded layoffs in the U.S. tech sector this year, with 73,499 job cuts. These account for roughly 43.08% of all tech layoffs in the country. Companies headquartered in California with the biggest layoffs in 2025 include Intel, Salesforce, Meta, HP, Workday, and Autodesk.
Washington State, another major hub for technology companies, has seen 42,221 tech jobs cut since the start of the year, accounting for 24.74% of all tech layoffs in the U.S. The biggest layoffs in the state of Washington happened at Microsoft, Amazon, Blue Origin, Redfin, and Expedia.
New York State has rapidly climbed the ranks of U.S. states experiencing the highest number of layoffs towards the end of 2025, with 26,900 tech job cuts, the vast majority concentrated in New York City. This represents 15.8% of the total 170,630 layoffs reported across the United States since the start of the year. The company responsible for the most redundancies by a considerable margin in the state is IBM, which has accounted for 9,000 job cuts since January 2025.
In Texas, at least 9,816 jobs have been cut this year across 17 tech companies, including Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Indeed, CrowdStrike, Match Group, and Bumble. This significant number of redundancies places Texas fourth among the U.S. states in terms of layoffs, even though its nearly 10,000 job losses account for just around 6% of the national total, showing just how concentrated tech company layoffs are in busier tech hubs such as California and Washington State.
Massachusetts ranks fifth with 3,477 out of all job cuts in the US. The companies with the most layoffs for the state are the following: Wayfair (1,070), Tripadvisor (716), Brightcove (450), and Symbotic (400). Boston has the most layoffs, with six out of the eleven companies headquartered in the city.
The State of the Tech Industry Going into 2026
The tech sector was hit hardest in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly a million jobs lost since 2021. In 2025, the ongoing wave of mass layoffs was largely driven by automation, AI-driven job displacement, and broader cost-cutting strategies. While roles easily replaced by automation were the first to go, Microsoft’s previous round of layoffs of 6,000 employees, including a prominent AI director for the company, show that even senior positions are no longer secure.
Hiring managers are placing greater emphasis on AI development as a core skill when evaluating candidates. Historically, when jobs have been at risk, companies have often turned to reskilling their workforce to help mitigate the impact of potential layoffs. Some executives, such as TCS’s K. Krithivasan, however, say that redeployment and finding new positions for current employees just to avoid layoffs does not work. Only time will tell if tech companies will continue to focus on cost-cutting and downsizing through 2026, or if advancements in AI will lead to the creation of new roles and opportunities in the technology market.
Methodology
For this report, the team at RationalFX examined all reported tech-company layoffs since the beginning of 2025, sourced from the IT job portal TrueUp.io. We also searched additional sources, including TechCrunch, Layoffs.fyi, and several WARN databases. These are publicly available announcements providing advance notice in cases of qualified plant closures and mass layoffs as required by the US Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
Layoff figures were first aggregated at company level to determine the total job cuts per firm. Next, companies were classified by the country in which they are headquartered, providing insight into the geographic distribution of layoffs. To highlight the most significant workforce reductions, firms were ranked by the number of jobs eliminated, while countries were ranked based on the total layoffs reported by companies operating within them.