Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech

A crypto-collapse, layoffs at Facebook and carnage at Twitter are rocking the tech industry. It’s stoking memories of the dot-com crash 20 years ago.

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Updated November 14, 2022 at 11:30 a.m. EST|Published November 12, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST
(Laura Padilla Castellanos/The Washington Post)
11 min

Over the past week, Silicon Valley companies have laid off 20,000 employees, a swift ramp-up of the job cuts and hiring freezes that have been ricocheting through the tech industry for months.

Twitter, Facebook parent Meta, payment platform Stripe, software service firm Salesforce, ride-hailing company Lyft and a growing list of smaller companies all laid off double-digit percentages of their workers. That means tens of thousands of engineers, salespeople and support staff in one of the country’s most important and highest-paying industries are out of a job. Meanwhile, other companies including Google and Amazon have recently instated hiring slowdowns and freezes. A New York Times report Monday said Amazon is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees.