High-profile tech layoffs in the past nine months

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

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 figures from 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 internal memo by Meta’s vice-president of human resources Janelle Gale showed that

about 3,600 employees,

or about 5 per cent of its workforce, would lose their jobs from Feb 10.

Employees in Singapore

were not spared,

with the only ones safe from cuts being those in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands because of local regulations.

A month earlier, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal note to employees that he aimed to “raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster”.

Bloomberg News reported then that the firm planned to cut 5 per cent of its total staff, based on performance, and would hire new workers to replace them.

TikTok, October 2024

The social media platform

laid off hundreds of employees

from its global workforce in October 2024, as part of plans to shift towards using artificial intelligence to moderate content.

A large number of staff in Malaysia were part of the cuts, although employees in Singapore were unaffected.

Earlier, in May 2024, media reports said TikTok

would be laying off a large percentage

of the roughly 1,000 people in its global user, content and marketing teams worldwide.

CNN reported then that affected employees were notified on the evening of May 22. At that point, TikTok had 7,000 employees in the US.

CNN also reported that TikTok’s global user operations team would cease to exist, while remaining employees would be reshuffled to the firm’s trust and safety, marketing, content or product divisions.

Dyson, October 2024

The Singapore-headquartered consumer electronics manufacturer

abruptly announced layoffs in Singapore

on Oct 1, 2024, affecting an undisclosed number of workers.

The move blindsided the union it had a signed a collective agreement with, and came three months after it laid off

about 1,000 of its 3,500 staff in Britain.

Dyson had said then that the Singapore office, which had roughly 1,920 staff at the end of 2023, would not be affected by the job cuts abroad.

Microsoft, September 2024

Microsoft Corporation embarked on at least three rounds of layoffs in 2024, with

the latest in September 2024

when 650 jobs were cut from its Xbox unit.

Earlier that year, in June, it cut

staff numbers at its Azure cloud unit,

involving as many as 1,500 job cuts, according to people familiar with the matter.

A month before that, it shuttered three studios it had acquired as part of its US$7.5 billion (S$10 billion) purchase of video game company ZeniMax, and sold one of them.

At the start of 2024, it

laid off 1,900 people,

many of whom were from video game publisher Activision’s units and studios.

Google, June 2024

The search giant

laid off at least 100 employees

from its cloud unit, reported CNBC on June 3, 2024, following a stream of terminations earlier in the year.

In January, it let go of 100 employees at YouTube, as well as hundreds who had worked across different teams, including those in advertising sales and engineering.